


Glass and Bone

by handoverthebiscuit



Category: Bleach
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-13 22:19:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10523052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handoverthebiscuit/pseuds/handoverthebiscuit
Summary: No two people could wield the same sword; one would have to die – they said it was sacrifice, atonement, that it would bring redemption to them both, but he knows it is nothing more than glorified murder, for a crime cannot pardon another crime. Character backstory.





	1. Chaper 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! I've been posting this for a while on FFnet, and never could be bothered to cross-post it over here, but I'm here! With regards to the warnings, well, since this is meant to be as canon as possible, we all know Kusaka dies...hold me...

_I dream of a plain of ice._

There is nobody there – only an endless expanse of white on white, of snow and ice and depthless bleak skies. For some reason, his feet leave no prints in the snow.

A biting wind blows cruelly and relentlessly, threatening to throw him askew, but he is determined to hold his ground. Snow and ice fly in the air as if they had life of their own, spiralling and rising and falling patternlessly yet rhythmically. It is, strangely, lifelessly breathtaking.

His face is numb, but he feels no cold.

_And on that plain of ice,_

There is nowhere to go, no way out – just clinical, beautiful destruction from horizon to horizon.

And yet, he is captivated. The snow is light and crumbles daintily between his fingers, and smells faintly like soil. The ice is clear as diamond and the air is violent, but everything is still, everything is silent.

_On that plain of ice…_

There is nobody there but him. For all its desolate beauty, he is devastatingly alone.

… _I die._

.

.

.

Winter was melting away into spring. The waters of the river were no longer too cold to wade in, new leaves were showing on trees that were once bare, and birds were beginning to sing. Hitsugaya was sitting cross-legged in the dirt, in a corner of the small park where the other children played. It was mostly a flat patch of ground, barren and dusty from being trampled upon almost daily, though somehow the others always managed to find ways to amuse themselves – some days they would run tirelessly, other days they would fish by the river, and still other days they would gather and spin tops in the dust until they were dirty and tired.

It had been years ago, long before Hinamori had left for the Academy, that he had effortlessly trounced them at spinning tops every single time. Naturally, they hated him with a vengeance.

Laughter, voices, footsteps approached from the path, and he glanced up to see three boys noisily enter the park, each holding his own prized wooden top.

It was almost exactly five years ago, he thought, when Hinamori left and they stopped begrudgingly including him – not that he was counting, and not that it bothered him that he didn't even know where he had left his own top. He should have known better than to think even for a second that they considered him one of "them".

'Hey!' One of the boys shouted from a distance away. 'We said you can't play here!'

Hitsugaya was immediately on his feet and ready for a fight. 'Does it look like I'm playing, you moron?' He fixed their ringleader with an icy glare, and most of the older boy's bravado vaporised, though he stood his ground firmly.

The other children were afraid of him, too afraid to lay a finger on him. Which was just as well, since he was easily the scrawniest among all of them in Junrinan, and if it ever came down to an actual confrontation, there would be no doubts about whose body would end up in the riverbed. Instead, they picked on him by throwing things and hurling insults.

Hitsugaya did normally try to be a pacifist, but somehow usually found it to be beyond his capabilities. He charged them, kicking up as much dust as he could while flinging both his slippers at the group of petrified boys. One of them dodged a second too late and a dirty slipper hit him in the shoulder, and instantly the small group was up in arms.

'He hit me!' the casualty cried. 'I've been jinxed!'

'Quick, wash it off in the river!'

Children were stupid, Hitsugaya thought, and he fled, not caring that he was going to lose a second pair of shoes in just as many days.

Normally, he would have spent the rest of the day wandering aimlessly and return home only when it was dark, yet today, for some strange reason, he found his feet carried him straight back to the simple house he had come to call home.

His grandmother was washing the rice she would use for dinner, and she smiled when she saw him approach from the path. He felt his insides twist with an emotion he couldn't pinpoint when he saw how much older, how much weaker she had become since he first knew her. He forced a smile.

'You're home early today,' she sounded happy, though Hitsugaya couldn't quite fathom why. 'Did you have fun?'

Hitsugaya grimaced. He had never told her about the way the other children treated him, or how he never spent even a fraction of the hours he was out of the house playing.

'Yeah,' he lied. 'I did.'

'That's good.'

_Nothing was good_ , he wanted to scream. Not the way he couldn't stop spinning lie after lie to his grandmother, not the way he woke in cold sweat every night with an empty aching in his heart, not the fact that he was constantly being haunted by visions of blizzards and a ghostly, thundering voice he couldn't hear.

He was about to hoist himself onto the porch, dirty feet and all, when a frigid gust swept over him, and all he saw was white.

_Come_

He knew the voice was calling him.

_Come_

Go where?

_Come to me_ , the wind howled in his ears. Was it a voice? The eerie urgency jarred his nerves, but he didn't understand, couldn't see beyond the swirling snow and hail, couldn't grasp the words in the air as they faded in the wind.

_Call my name_ , the wind commanded, this time no louder than a whisper amidst the building storm.

_I don't know your name_ , he thought desperately. _Who are you?_

_My name is-_ a gale whipped around him, a screeching howl in the engulfing snow.

Then it was gone. He was left standing in the dirt in front of the house to catch his breath, one hand outstretched and grasping at air, the warm spring breeze burning his skin as if it were fire. None of it was real, he told himself.

'Toshiro?' his grandmother called from the dim interior of the wooden house. 'Is something the matter?'

He hastily wiped his clammy palms on his clothes and scrambled for something – anything – to say. He wanted to tell her everything he had been hiding, wanted to believe that telling people things would magically fix his problems.

Instead, what tumbled from his mouth was, 'Can I go to the market? We ran out of amanatto yesterday.'

It was another lie, another excuse to push people away from him. He didn't know how to stop himself, didn't know how being honest with himself even felt anymore. No wonder the other children were terrified of him.

His grandmother's soft hands pressed money into his own bony hands, and she kissed the top of his head as if he were still little. 'Run along,' she said. 'Buy whatever you want.'

He looked at the silver coins he held, counting enough for at least three bags of sweets, and shuffled back down the path.

The store he visited was one of the few he had yet to be kicked out of. He peered in cautiously before stepping in and heading for the shelf where they kept the sweets. In less than ten seconds, every other customer had made a speedy retreat and hurried out of the store, and the shopkeeper cast him a dirty look that was difficult to ignore.

Hitsugaya quickly picked out two of his favourite, and brought them to the counter, where the shopkeeper was still eyeing him with great suspiscion, as if he expected him to slip something into his pocket at any moment.

He paid the shopkeeper little regard as the man warily wrapped up his purchases and counted his money, and instinctively held out one hand to receive the change.

The shopkeeper visibly hesitated, obviously reluctant to touch the jinxed child of the village. Eventually, he dropped the copper coins onto the counter and folded his arms impatiently.

'Go on,' he urged gruffly. 'You're done, aren't you?'

Hitsugaya sighed, but he didn't even have the chance to pick the coins off the smooth wood of the counter before a considerable force smacked him in the back of the head. He felt himself lurching forward, and couldn't stop himself from flyng straight into the corner of the counter, bouncing off with a painful _thwack_ and falling backwards onto the ground, one hand clutched to his nose.

His first thought was that the idiots from earlier had found him and thrown a rock at the back his head. Sneaky monsters. But no, whatever had hit him had been…softer than rocks. Actually, softer than most things he'd had thrown at his head. It was his nose that was in pain.

He was just about to peel himself off the floor when a woman began shouting.

'Is that how you treat your customers here?' she demanded. 'Just because he's a kid doesn't mean you can treat him however you want!'

The shopkeeper gibbered, and Hitsugaya was going to _run_ , but he moved a second too late.

He was yanked unceremoniously off the ground, and found himself face to face with a blond woman dressed in the black of the Shinigami. There was a sword at her hip, and he briefly wondered if she was going to arrest him for existing, because it seemed like the kind of thing they would do.

'And you!' she practically shouted at him as she shook him by the collar. 'You call yourself a man? You can't spend all day lying on the floor crying!'

Rich, he thought, coming from the person who had knocked him to the ground in the first place. It was then that he noticed the lady's ample bosom, and he finally realised what exactly had hit him in the head.

Hitsugaya checked his hand to see if his nose was bleeding, and yelled right back in her face, 'I wasn't crying! Let me _go_!'

A feral howl echoed in the back of his mind as he wrenched out of the shinigami's grip, sending chills down his spine, but he paid it little heed as he scooped up his sweets and ran out of the store.

After that encounter, he had spent the rest of the day on the roof of the house, hiding from his grandmother so he wouldn't have to explain to her how he'd managed to lose her money and get a nosebleed in one simple trip to the market. Eventually, though, she'd found him and coaxed him down, insisting that he clean his face on a damp towel.

'No, I'm fine,' he said when she asked if someone had hit him, and batted away her hand when she tried to smother his face with the towel. 'It stopped bleeding hours ago.'

His grandmother never grew impatient with him, he marvelled as she finally settled on leaving the towel in his hands, and taking his candy away to the kitchen.

'I know it's spring,' she said gently but firmly as she forced him into an oversized wool-lined haori, 'but the nights have been very cold recently. You must keep warm, or you'll catch a cold.'

Hitsugaya didn't have the heart to argue, so he let her roll up the sleeves and mutely ate dinner at the table, which ended with him mindlessly picking at the fish and listlessly pushing rice around his bowl without really eating anything.

About three mouthfuls of food into the meal, he gave up and returned to the roof.

.

That night, he dreamt of ice and snow again.

It was the same place, the same dream. The familiarly uninviting carpet of arctic tundra unfurled before him, and immediately he was met with swirling winds and biting cold. His fingers were beginning to hurt from the sheer cold, and he coud feel fear begin to bubble up within him.

This was different.

Before, he had always felt a strange disconnection, that what he saw and what he felt contradicted – he had always felt _safe,_ far enough away that he was beyond the destruction. As if the winds couldn't touch him, couldn't hurt him, as if they were never really real.

This time, he felt so very vulnerable. The wind was cruel, and the ice was sharp. His senses were keenly aware of the fact that he was in danger, that one wrong move could send him beyond rescue. He was too terrified to move a muscle, and painfully aware that he was here alone. Perhaps he would die again.

He was beginning to curl in on himself, skinny arms wrapped around his torso in a flimsy attempt to fend off the cold. He could feel his body tremble uncontrollably, could see his breath coalesce into ice before his own eyes. The crystals of his breath shimmered in the faint light and scattered in the wind like dust, taking his strength away with every passing second.

It felt all too real, the fear in his veins so frighteningly palpable that perhaps, he thought, it might just be another dream – just a hallucination. Just another sign that maybe he was actually going mad.

He was crouched on the ground, snow hotter than fire burning his skin and blinding his sight. In the midst of the storm, he heard the familiar sound of ice cracking and freezing and crystallising, like glass and bone shattering over and over again.

Before him, an immense dragon of ice appeared through the mist. They were separated by a storm of a scale he had never experienced before, and despite the murderous combination of wind and snow and ice whipping at his entire body, he found himself able to rise, entranced by the apparition.

The excruciating pain of being overwhelmed by the elements compounded upon him, and though his breath came with difficulty, he found himself still standing, albeit unsteadily, and unable to take his eyes off the majestic mythical creature. It was bluer than the sky, and towered over everything. The dragon had rubies for eyes and an enormous wingspan, and its jaw was open, as if it were roaring into the winds.

It took him a while to realise there were words in the storm, whispered under the howling of the gale, dissolving into an indecipherable murmur before they reached his ears.

_Toshiro, call my name._

This voice, the voice of the air, the voice that had been calling him all this time, it belonged to this dragon. The realisation seemed to lift a weight off his chest, because for some reason it felt right.

'I don't know your name!' he shouted into the storm, though his words were swallowed so quickly he hadn't even heard himself.

_My name is-_

A roaring shriek of wind ripped the dragon's words away from his ears.

'I can't hear you!'

It was so frustrating he wanted to hit something. He took a step forward, though he knew nothing would change.

_My name is-_

Hitsugaya woke with a start to a hand on his shoulder. He shot upright, his skin burning under the stack of blankets his grandmother had heaped upon him, and in the pale moonlight of the night, he saw the last person on earth he'd ever expected to see in his home.

The shinigami he had run into at the store that afternoon stood in the room, all shadows and darkness except her eyes, which glowed eerily with an unearthly power.

She was staring at him, and he stared straight back, still reeling from the shock of being jerked out of the snowstorm and landing back down in reality.

'Kid,' the shinigami said in a grave tone he didn't think the crazy lady from the afternoon would ever possess. 'Pull back your power.'

His what?

Hitsugaya squinted at her and blinked furiously, as if it would make her disappear from the room.

The hard look on the shinigami's face softened, and she gestured to the nearby futon where his grandmother slept.

'Your grandmother looks cold,' she informed him, the stern edge from her voice suddenly gone. 'Pull back your spiritual power, or you'll end up killing her.'

Her words struck him painfully in the heart, and sure enough, he turned to see the one person in the entire village who loved him shivering in bed and looking extremely sickly.

He recalled how he had noticed her slowly growing thinner and weaker as the days passed, and yet had not done anything, had not drawn the correlation between the onset of his disturbing dreams and his grandmother's declining health. Then he noticed how the air stung the way only the crisp air of midwinter dawn did, and how a layer of frost had cast intricate flowers of ice across the floor.

Surely he didn't do that – couldn't have done that.

'I-I don't know what you're talking about,' he stammered.

This time, the shinigami knelt kindly in front of him. 'You hear a voice, don't you?' she asked gently, with a strangely bittersweet smile on her face, and placed a warm hand over his aching heart, where the storms raged and the dragon roared in silence. 'In here.'

Hitsugaya looked at his hands, at the floor, at anything but the shinigami's blazing eyes.

'I hear a voice,' he began softly. 'I dream of ice and snow, where a dragon calls my name.' He let out a long, puffy breath, and spoke as if he didn't care if anyone heard him or not. 'The calling doesn't stop. The visions hurt. Nothing makes sense.'

'There is only one way out.'

Hitsugaya raised his gaze, slightly surprised at not being accused of insanity.

The shinigami looked him in the eyes, her stare piercing through his soul. 'Become a shinigami, kid, and answer the call.'

.

The crazy lady had dragged him out of bed, left a note for his sleeping grandmother and forced him out into the chilly morning air of early spring.

'It's not kidnapping,' she reassured him as he sceptically followed her out into the pale blue dawn. 'I fully plan on returning you home in one piece before the day ends. There's just someone I want you to meet, and some errands we need to run. Tell me, have I introduced myself?'

Hitsugaya shook his head. He was perfectly fine with calling her "crazy lady" or "weird shinigami" all day, though.

'Right!' she laughed lightly, and smiled brightly at him. 'I'm Matsumoto Rangiku, and you are?'

'Hitsugaya Toshiro,' he mumbled as he shuffled down the path after her in an old pair of slippers. 'Where are we going anyway?'

Matsumoto clasped her hands together almost gleefully. 'To the pub, of course!'

'The pub?' Hitsugaya echoed, horrified. The pub was where old men went to get inebriated. It was a temple of drunkenness and debauchery, and also where nosey kids got beaten up.

'Yes,' Matsumoto said, all his apprehension bouncing off her. 'With luck he'll still be there.'

As it turned out, the "he" that Matsumoto spoke of was not the pub's manager or member of staff as Hitsugaya had suspected. As they entered the dank establishment, one of the waiters waved her in with a wide smile.

'The captain is in the back, Miss Rangiku. The usual room,' he said through his unfaltering smile, and not once did he or any of the other staff or even the other customers mention the conspicuous minor she had in tow.

Hitsugaya supposed it was the kind of power shinigami commanded.

The room they entered was dim, and in one corner was a man in violently pink garb, lying across two cushions with a large straw hat over his face. He lifted one corner of the hat and peered at them.

'Oh, Rangiku!' he slurred, reaching out for the bottle of alcohol on the table but froze when he noticed Hitsugaya. 'You know, it isn't fun if one-third of the party can't drink. Unless, of course, he is already hardened in the ways at a tender age, in which case I will gladly oblige to purchase another round…'

So far, Hitsugaya was not impressed. Drunkenness, check; debauchery, check.

'Captain Kyoraku,' Matsumoto said as he trailed off. 'We are here on business today.'

'Oh?'

Matsumoto shifted slightly uneasily. 'Do you know about the reiatsu disturbances in Rukongai that the Tenth has been investigating?'

Kyoraku nodded, although he could have just been nodding off, Hitsugaya couldn't be sure. Matsumoto took it as permission to continue.

'I, uh,' she gave Hitsugaya a sidelong glance. 'I kind of found it,' she said, gesturing helplessly at him.

The captain burst out in uncontrollable laughter. 'This kid's the one that's been throwing all our radars off?'

'I need you to authorise his entry to the Spiritual Academy for the upcoming term. We can't let him roam with his powers unchecked any longer, but applications are over.'

'I may be on the board of education,' Kyoraku said sombrely, and Hitsugaya realised that perhaps he wasn't drunk at all. 'But he'll still have to take the test.'

Test? What test? He'd never taken a test his entire life.

Matsumoto nodded confidently. 'He'll pass whatever entrance test they have to throw at him.'

And on what experience was she basing that assumption on?

Kyoraku gave him a sharp once-over, then sat up with the disgrace of one who had been rolling on the floor for hours and couldn't tell up from down. 'I'll write a letter, and have them conduct a private test.'

He then proceeded to scribble a rather illegible note, stuffed it into an envelope, and handed it over to Matsumoto, who promptly stowed it away somewhere in her bosom. Met with such a mind-boggling situation, Hitsugaya was beginning to despair, and desperately hoped he would never become one of these pub-frequenting types.

.

The test had turned out to not be much of a test.

The lady at the Academy's administration office cringed when Matsumoto procured the letter from her robes, and gingerly accepted it. Then they had taken him into a room and spent a good minute alternating between scribbling on paper and whispering in hushed tones about spiritual pressure levels or something or the other before finally inviting him to sit at the table.

'Is he literate?' One of the teachers asked Matsumoto, who had been standing behind him all the while.

'Of course he is,' Hitsugaya interrupted rudely. 'He also speaks.'

The adults in the room exchanged weary glances, and the head teacher fixed him with an intimidating look. 'Very well, I want a demonstration of your powers.'

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Matsumoto gesturing wildly in some form of protest, mouthing rapidly and her eyes bugged out. Ignoring her, he levelled the teacher with a glare of his own, which was slightly difficult since the man was about twice Hitsugaya's height and had arms the size of his torso. Hitsugaya didn't let his nervousness show.

He closed his eyes, and before he could even summon the thought, the ever-persistent plain of ice swallowed him up with ease, as if it were a fresh and vivid yet ever-changing memory. He let the cold wash over him, let the wind eat away at his senses, but no matter how long he waited, the dragon never appeared. The whispers in the wind brushed past him, rustling and dissipating simultaneously as he willed the storm to strengthen, willed the dragon to present itself before him once again.

The bone chilling sounds of the dragon coiling and uncoiling met his ears, grating and brittle and eerily melodious, but before the mist even began showing signs of clearing, a heavy hand landed on his shoulder, hauling him back to the heat of reality. The moment had been too short, and he was left feeling dissatisfied and empty and disoriented.

Hitsugaya noticed that everyone in the room was lightly coated in frost.

'Okay, stop,' he was told, while he was still blinking the mist out of his eyes. 'Given the circumstances, we'll take him,' the head teacher said to Matsumoto, and he took the letter Kyoraku had written from his assistant and slid it into a large file.

Hitsugaya wondered if he knew where it had been, but was quickly whisked away from that train of thought when a large bundle was shoved into his arms.

'Term starts on Monday,' the head teacher said gruffly before turning to Matsumoto. 'Vice-captain Matsumoto, I will need you to fill in the necessary paperwork by today.'

Matsumoto made a strangled noise, and one of the other teachers ushered Hitsugaya out of the room.

Once they were in the corridor, that outrageously tall teacher crouched before him in a somewhat demeaning manner. 'Now, just because you've been accepted on special conditions doesn't mean you can act like you run the place. If anything, we expect you to be more than excellent in both your studies and your training.'

Not knowing what to say, Hitsugaya nodded.

'And that,' the teacher continued, jerking his chin at the humongous bundle Hitsugaya was struggling to handle, 'is your uniform and training gear. It is the smallest size we have, but I expect you will need to do a little hemming before Monday.'

This was all happening too fast, he thought. He hadn't even decided if he was going to show up on Monday, or if he was going to let the rhythm of life he had fallen into continue its endless course. He had gotten used to dodging people, ignoring the taunts of the other children, passing time by himself. He didn't want change, not here, not now.

'Yeah, okay,' he mumbled.

'In military academy, you say "yes sir".'

Hitsugaya gave a wry smile. 'Yeah, okay. Starting Monday.' _If_ he showed up.

.

He did not know how to broach the subject with his grandmother. _Hi, just to let you know, I'm leaving for pretty much ever in, like, four days. Bye? So long and thanks for all the fish?_

No.

He was almost home now, the uniform weighing heavy in his arms, the sun setting into the horizon with blinding colours splayed over the sky.

He didn't _have_ to go, he reasoned. He could dump the uniform in the river and pretend nothing had ever happened. He could continue living the blissfully ignorant countryside life, could get used to the awful dreams of the snow and the ice and the dragon. He didn't have to "answer the call", as Matsumoto had put it.

He could let it all pass him by – his one chance to break free, to start over, to leave behind this dull life of calm monotony and unsettling stability. He didn't _need_ the life of bold adventure and evil-slaying – he wanted to stay here, here where he knew nothing would change, where everything would be the same, where it didn't matter that no one cared about him because there was one person who did.

_Pull back your spiritual power, or you'll end up killing her._

He shivered, and hated himself for feeling cold.

He needed to go, he realised, if not for himself then for his grandmother, for the further he stayed from her, the safer she would be. The further he kept the dragon from her, the safer she would be.

Like clockwork, he clambered onto the porch and shuffled inside, kicking his shoes off by the door.

'Granny?' he called out, his footsteps echoing hollowly around him. The house had always felt strangely empty, a little too big ever since Hinamori had left. He wondered how it would be when he was gone.

He deposited the load of uniform he didn't know he had been gripping so tightly in the corridor and stepped into the room where his grandmother was seated by the table, a mug of tea raised partway to her lips. He met her questioning gaze for a moment, and quickly tore his eyes away from her, choosing instead to look at the ground, counting the grains in the weave of the mats. 'Granny, I…'

He heard the clink of her mug being placed back in its saucer. 'Toshiro,' he heard her kind voice say. 'What's wrong? You look so upset. Did something happen?'

He hated that she was concerned, hated that she cared for him in this moment where he wished she did not. He knelt before her so quickly he was certain it looked as if he had collapsed to the ground.

'I…' he started hesitantly. 'I'm going to the Academy,' he said so softly he wasn't sure if his grandmother could hear him.

_I wish I didn't have to go._

'I…I want to be a shinigami.'

_No, I don't want to, not if it means leaving everything behind._

He was surprised he had managed the words.

Hitsugaya found himself half wishing that he could take his words back, run to the river and drown the uniform, drown his memories of the past day, and most of all drown the dragon that was ruining him.

Unsure what to expect of his grandmother's reaction, he jerked with shock when she wrapped her arms around him in a warm and familiar hug – and it was then that he realised his vision was blurred by tears that had brimmed in his eyes, and he tried his best to blink them away.

'Oh, the Academy! I'm so glad for you,' she exclaimed – kindly and gently, as if they were the only tones she had used in years. 'I've heard such wonderful things about Seireitei,' she said through the smile beaming on her face, crinkled with wrinkles and crows feet but ever so radiant. 'I'm so proud of you.'

Every word of her joy seemed to tear him up, to twist up his insides until he didn't know how to breathe, how to feel. He raised his head to meet his grandmother's gaze, awkwardly extricating himself from her embrace. He couldn't quite see her face, for the more he tried to blink away the tears the harder and faster they came.

'Really?'

'Of course.'

'You won't be lonely?'

'No, of course not,' she reassured him, wiping his tears away with her soft fingers.

'I'm going to be so, _so_ lonely,' he choked on the last word, and before he knew it, he was sobbing uncontrollably and hiccupping until his lungs hurt, clinging desperately to his grandmother's shoulders, wishing he could turn back time and change everything.

'Oh, Toshiro, don't be. Everything will get better,' she promised, though the sparkle in her eyes had gone, replaced with a deep sorrow Hitsugaya knew he had caused. He thought of the dragon, of how it was tearing him and his grandmother apart, and wondered if anything would get better at all. His own distress was breaking her heart, he thought, and he couldn't bear it.

Wiping his face on his sleeves, Hitsugaya swallowed his fear, his doubts, and his despair. He wouldn't – couldn't – let himself drag others into his own anguish, wouldn't shed another tear if it meant placing his own burden upon someone else's shoulders, couldn't bare his weaknesses and foolishness to anyone else ever again.

There was only one way out.


	2. Chapter 2

His first day at the Academy was every bit as awful as Hitsugaya had expected. He had been stepped on approximately fifteen times in his efforts to enter the main gate and had also already tripped one person over. The main courtyard between the school and its front gates was overflowing with students of all sizes, and Hitsugaya immediately wished he hadn't come. There was a large notification board papered with names near the front, which far too many people were clamouring over, and beyond that the suffocating crowd thinned to a tolerable level, though he still wasn't quite sure why he was trying so hard to get in.

By some miracle, he managed to report in at the administration office, receive a fat folder of documents, find his way to the dormitory, and figure out which bunk he had been allocated, all without tripping over his own sandals or being trampled underfoot by some passing buffoon. Ignoring the stares he was getting from everyone else in the room, Hitsugaya deposited his belongings in his locker and shuffled out into the corridor, where it seemed war had broken out.

'Which one of you brainless idiots took my shoes?' A tall student stood by the door in his socks, red in the face and looking as if he were about to burst an artery. A pile of straw sandals littered the doorway as students – ranging from teenagers to grown men – entered and left the dormitory, and though they all looked the same to Hitsugaya, evidently this crazy guy was going to have a fit.

'What's it matter?' someone shouted over the chaos. 'They're all the same!'

'Yeah!' the rest of the room echoed.

'If I find out which one of you rats took my shoes-'

'Aw, shut it, Toyoda!'

Hitsugaya glanced at the clock. They had thirty minutes before they were supposed to report for their first class, and if the current situation was any indicator of anything, the hierarchy within the class would be decided before they even took roll call. Taking a gamble, Hitsugaya swiped a pair of shoes at least twice the size of his own, ducked under flailing arms and angry people, and sped down the corridor, not quite knowing what Plan B was going to be.

Hitsugaya spent the next half-hour wandering down corridors in his socks, noticing things, observing people. He knew where the shower room was, had found the upperclassmen's dojo, passed by the nurse's office, and discovered a lush inner courtyard glowing with greenery and fresh with air. All the while, he clutched his textbooks to his chest and the oversized sandals under his arm, casually passing the time until the bell rang.

He stood and watched a safe distance away from the classroom door, where Toyoda was still being an idiot.

'I'm going to skin him alive when I find him,' the black-haired young man declared. 'Those were order made from the best shop in Seireitei.'

So he was one of those Seireitei-born, self-entitled pricks, Hitsugaya thought to himself. He could teach himself to deal with those, he figured. He watched as other boys dragged the enraged Toyoda into the classroom, counted off thirty seconds, then stuffed his feet into the boat-sized sandals he had taken and shuffled up to the door, which had been neatly shut.

He pulled it open with a clatter, slightly surprised to find that he had singlehandedly managed to silence a classroom full of meatheads when the teacher at the front could not. He felt fifty pairs of eyes whoosh over his head before settling for a lower angle on their second try. He tried to stare back at all of them.

'And why are you late, young man?' The teacher for the advanced class was willowy but commanding, slender-built yet obviously battle-fit, and had the fiercest expression Hitsugaya had ever seen on his face – and that was saying something, because he had angered as many people as he had encountered in Rukongai.

Hitsugaya took a shuffling step forward, cleared his throat, and looked straight at the teacher. 'I couldn't walk properly. Someone took my shoes,' he said loudly, giving Toyoda a quick glance out of the corner of his eye. The man was turning a dangerous shade of purple. Several of the boys sniggered, while the girls looked genuinely bewildered, as if they couldn't believe something was already happening.

The teacher sighed, one hand on his temple, as if _he_ couldn't believe something was already happening. 'Whoever it is,' he addressed the classroom at large, 'we do not tolerate bullying in this institute. Do you understand?'

There was a chorus of half-hearted murmurs, and he turned to Hitsugaya. 'And you, I will not tolerate any further tardiness. Sit down.'

Hitsugaya smiled serenely as he walked past Toyoda to one of the empty seats near the back of the room, leaving the sandals he had taken on the floor by the older student's feet. They were so ridiculously large even the taller-than-average buffoon wouldn't be able to walk properly in them. 'Here, maybe these are yours?' he suggested calmly.

'I'm going to kill you during training,' Toyoda threatened emptily.

Hitsugaya was only slightly worried throughout the lesson, in which he received multiple death glares from his very first enemy. It wasn't as if Toyoda could actually kill him without consequences, so there was always revenge to be plotted. _Kill him with creepiness_ , he thought to himself, and smiled icily at him, baring two neat rows of straight milk teeth.

Their homeroom teacher, who introduced himself as Fujiwara, proceeded to brief them on the six-year curriculum that awaited them before they could become shinigami. First- and Second-years studied sciences and humanities, and practised basic physical and spiritual training. They would begin advanced tactical studies in their third year and begin training in meditation. By their fourth year, they would choose a specialisation and continue intensive studies alongside training. And as it turned out, "humanities" was a ridiculously broad umbrella term that covered everything from history and ancient literature to geography and social studies, all of which were supposedly taught by Fujiwara, which led Hitsugaya to severely doubt the actual depth of the content they would be covering.

Next, they received a timetable, which much to everyone's alarm, began at six in the morning. Hitsugaya had to admit, six was ridiculous, and training before breakfast was even more so. Every day was the same – it began with an hour of cleaning the dojo, then an hour of training before breakfast, followed by more training until eleven and another hour of cleaning before lunch. The afternoon was filled with classroom lessons, which sounded perfect for a post-lunch siesta.

By the time the block was over, Hitsugaya was half asleep, with his chin resting comfortably on the table, and though he was loathe to haul himself out of the seat, he wasn't entirely keen on staying there all day.

.

It was towards the end of their first week in the Academy that Hitsugaya noticed that he was being left out. People were drifting together, forming cliques, eating meals in groups, studying and training with the same people – it wasn't anything new to him. People were social creatures, they made "friends"; he'd seen Hinamori befriend almost the entire village in Junrinan. He had yet to exchange a word with most of his classmates, but judging by the wide-eyed looks he received whenever he looked any of them in the eye and the hushed and hurried whispers that flew by in the corridors, that wasn't likely to change. He was the weirdo with the white hair, the creep with the green eyes, the idiot that had made an enemy out of Toyoda. That was okay.

_He_ was okay.

He was fine, until they had their first actual sparring session one morning in the dojo. 'Your form is abominable and your footwork is abysmal, but there is no better time to squash bad habits than the beginning,' their head instructor Sakamoto informed them. 'Take your wooden swords and find a partner. One on one, two points to win, and unless you want to spend the rest of the year cleaning ditches, there will be no head blows. Understood?'

'Yes sir!'

And in the time it took Hitsugaya to blink, Toyoda descended upon him.

'We got a match to settle, don't we, midget?'

Hitsugaya stopped biting his lip, his instincts leaping to defend himself as he had done so many times in Rukongai. 'We got to be a bit more creative with our insults, don't we, moron? You must be at least the hundredth person to call me that.'

Toyoda brandished his wooden sword in his face. 'Watch your mouth, midget, no one calls me a moron.'

Hitsugaya nearly burst out laughing, but managed to swallow it. Instead, he took several paces back and assumed the stance they had been taught, with a double-handed grip on his own sword, raised high in alignment with his target. His knees were bent, ready to spring, and he didn't take his eyes off his opponent.

He moved when his opponent did, his sword flying up to block a downward swing and around again to protect his side, He parried the blow and anchored his weight downwards for a counterstrike, but felt the blow to his ribcage before he heard it, and heard the terrifying crack of wood on flesh before he saw it.

Instantly his entire torso was on fire, and between the rain of blows on his shoulders and knees and shins, he ended up face down on the mat, struggling for breath as a crushing weight bore down on his lungs, his grip on his weapon lost.

On the battlefield, he would have been dead. It hadn't even been twenty seconds since they started.

'Stop!' he heard someone yell. It took him several moments to realise it was their instructor, and that he was in class, not at the riverside in some petty fight in the village. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?'

The noisy room was now dead quiet, and very slowly, Hitsugaya felt the weight release him, and he rolled over onto his back. It took more than a few gasping breaths to get the room to stop spinning, and when it finally did, he cracked open an eye to behold the spectacle he had become the centre of.

Everyone was gathered in a stunned circle around them, some with their jaws agape, others with their eyes popped open.

'You!' Sakamoto was shouting. 'If you wish to become a respected _shinigami_ you will learn to fight with pride and dignity and mercy when needed! And you!' he turned to Hitsugaya coldly. 'You will learn to improvise against your weaknesses if you wish to survive basic training.'

Hitsugaya heaved a bruised arm over his face and groaned, but dragged himself off the floor, nodding when he was asked if he knew where the nurse's office was.

'Very well, run along.'

Wordlessly, he picked his sword off the floor and shuffled out of the room, stopping briefly at the doorway with a quick bow, with absolutely no intention to see the nurse. He had been asked if he knew where the office was, and then allowed to leave, and so leave he did.

It was still relatively early, and Hitsugaya found himself walking towards the training fields, where the older students were practising. He watched them spar with swords, then train in _hakuda_ , and took mental notes. He watched people who fought opponents bigger than they were, those who fought opponents stronger than they were, and analysed their movements – what worked and what didn't, moves he could borrow and make his own. Then he watched people who fought opponents smaller than they were, how they moved and how they attacked and imagined how he could block them and turn the blow against them. He watched until his eyes burned and his head pounded, but still he stayed,

All the while, his teacher's words echoed hollowly in his ears, ringing endlessly.

_You will learn to improvise against your weaknesses._

Hitsugaya rested his chin on his knees with a heavy sigh. Easier said than done, he complained to himself. Sakamoto was talking trash – how could he improvise his way to excellence? Was he meant to go from weak to strong through sheer wit and luck? No – hard work would get him further, faster.

From that day on, he committed himself not just to his training but also to his studies.

He stopped sleeping in class and actually did his homework; he would read ahead and spend mealtimes with his nose in a book. He was outside on the training grounds before morning classes and after evening lessons; on weekends and in poor weather he would be barricaded in the library behind a towering stack of books on history and modern studies.

He honed his skill and perfected his form in the field, and he spent so much time in the library even the librarian asked if he was sane. He'd just smiled serenely and asked her to retrieve the textbook on meditation the third years were using, and she'd frowned and given him a strange look.

Within the week, the librarian had bought him a stepladder.

By the end of the month, he had perfected the skills in the first years' syllabus and was practising attacks and blocks and strategies he'd learned from books and from watching the older students practise. He knew more _kido_ spells than an average second-year student and fired them with frightening speed and accuracy. Ancient Literature was still the most useless subject to ever grace the earth, and Mathematics seemed to come a close second, but for some strange reason he was still ahead of the class.

His grades shot up by a margin he hadn't anticipated, and his rankings in the dojo and on the field inched up slowly but steadily as he won every duel and spar that came his way, and destroyed every target he ever aimed at. He was constantly tired and his muscles constantly ached, but when he saw his reflection in the mirror, he saw someone different from the skinny boy with the ratty hair from two months ago. He was no longer a wide-eyed, frightened child fleeing from confrontations – there was determination in his eyes where there had once been fear, resolve in his expression where there had once been hesitation, and confidence in his stride where there had once been insecurity. He was different, he was changing, yet he was ever and always alone.

_Loneliness is my eternal curse_ , he thought to himself. _I must turn it around, to be my weapon._

The rumours that he had gone mad were spreading like wildfire – the funniest one being something along the lines that he had been possessed by the ghost of an ancient warrior – but by the end of the second month, the fruits of his efforts were evident.

.

'Summer,' the sixth-year student at the front of the crowd drawled as he addressed the anxious group of first-years. 'The sun rises earlier, the humidity goes through the roof, rainy season ends and the cicadas drive everyone crazy, then the heat kills us off, but not before the itty bitty first-years embark on their first ever field assignment and come back gibbering like babies.'

He was met with a sea of vacant, uncomprehending stares.

'Every year,' the sixth-year began again after a dramatic sigh, 'the first-years go on their first field assignment, which is conducted by the sixth-years. You will spend three hours hunting down and destroying targets. This exercise requires you to work in groups, and tests both your combat skill and your strategy.'

People were starting to nod, and complied when they were instructed to draw lots and form teams of three to four students.

It was just past dawn in the outskirts of Soul Society, where they had been gathered for the exercise. Hitsugaya was, as usual, apprehensive of everything, but went along with his groupmates, a tall girl and an even taller boy (then again, everyone was tall where he was concerned) who had introduced themselves as Sugihara and Watanabe, not that he quite remembered which was which.

They were obviously uneasy being grouped with him, but were nice enough to stick around instead of abandoning him in the shrubbery like he was sure some others would have done without a second thought.

'Why don't we go this way?' Sugihara(?) pointed towards an abandoned building.

Hitsugaya shrugged, and trotted wordlessly after his classmates, one hand kept at the ready on his sword. At this point, they had not even been briefed on what "moving targets" they were after, and what constituted as "destroying" them. He wondered if it was deliberate, or if the student in charge was just being incompetent.

He didn't have long to wonder, for someone shouted, and he looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure in black dashing across the clearing.

'Come on! After him!'

'What? Which way did he go?'

And in a flurry of unnecessarily noisy footsteps, they took off after the target.

The sky was quickly lightening, making their targets easier to spot, though that didn't make them any easier to catch. They were nearly an hour into the assignment, and Hitsugaya's group had yet to even capture one, let alone destroy it.

'Dear god, I missed again,' Watanabe muttered as a flash of light flew towards the target and veered off-course. The three of them had agreed that chasing the targets down for a sword fight would be pure lunacy, and that firing _kido_ would be their best option, but despite his proficiency in the practice field, Hitsugaya had come to realise that hitting a target that moved faster than he could run was close to impossible. After narrowly missing for what must have been the millionth time, he stopped abruptly, and ducked into a nearby building, which was only dimly lit and appeared to be in a state of ruin. It had an open rooftop, which was exactly what he was after – if only he could get up.

'What are we doing?'

'Higher ground! Look for the stairs!' Hitsugaya jumped over a small pile of debris and peered around the corner, only to find another long, dark corridor before him. He was about to curse whoever had designed the building for hiding the stairs so well, when a muffled and echoed shout from behind told him that someone had found the stairs.

'We should have thought of this _years_ ago,' Hitsugaya moaned as they took the stairs two at a time, bursting through the door at the top onto the flat rooftop. From the top of the five-storey building, they could see targets in black and students in a mix of blue and red below, moving along the streets like toys.

The trio leaned over the parapet for a moment.

'We should have thought of this _years_ ago,' Sugihara echoed morosely, and for the first time, the three of them exchanged hesitant smiles that dissolved into awkward chuckles.

Hitsugaya wondered if that was what it meant to have friends, or if they were just comrades in battle, forced together by circumstance.

From the rooftop, the targets' movements became much easier to read, and though they were much further away, they were that much easier to aim at. Hitsugaya had destroyed about three, consecutively firing _byakurai_ onto the street where the targets would change from black to white before dissolving into the wind, certain that such actions would get any regular civilian arrested, when Watanabe called him over from the other side of the roof.

'I'd bet everything I own,' he said lowly as he pointed at a target that moved devilishly fast and in the most unpredictable fashion in a dank alley, 'that targets like that one are worth at least twice as much as the normal ones.'

Hitsugaya nodded. 'If we blast it from three directions, it'll have nowhere to run, and at least one of us should hit it.'

They released three attacks at once with commendable accuracy and synchronisation, which should have destroyed the target, yet instead of the usual flash of white, they only saw their attacks collapse into each other.

'What?'

'Where did it go?'

It had disappeared without a trace, so fast that none of them had seen it. Hitsugaya could only think of one explanation. ' _Shunpo_ ,' he breathed. 'I didn't know they could do that.'

This effectively set Watanabe on fire. 'They must be worth a whole lot more than I first thought! Come on, we need to get it – I'm flunking literature, I need all the points I can get, where did it go?'

He was met with silence, for Hitsugaya had already spotted the escaped target and was watching it like a hawk. He had his right hand pointing towards the target and his left supporting his right wrist, lips moving as he went through the incantation for a spell they had barely begun in class. It was an altogether chilling sight, of a child with flying hair and glowing eyes, a face of innocence with a look of murder, chanting in what might as well had been a foreign language as he built his concentration and forced his powers to coalesce before him, and a blue sphere of light began to collect and grow in both size and intensity at his fingers. Sweat beaded on his brow and his chin quivered ever so slightly, but he didn't falter, didn't blink, didn't let his aim stray off his target for even a second.

' _Hado no 33, Sokatsui!_ '

Hitsugaya stumbled as he felt his spiritual power physically leave him, manifested in a large ball of blue fire that rocketed towards the black target. It engulfed the target before it could dodge out of the alley, and it flashed white for a moment before disappearing amid a cloud of smoke and the triumphant cheers of his teammates. He felt the thrill of battle for the first time – a strange, foreign bubbling of adrenaline that spread like a welcome fire, and instantly hated himself for revelling in destruction.

'You may have just rescued my GPA,' Watanabe said in awe.

Still slightly out of breath, Hitsugaya turned and leaned over the parapet again, only to step back in surprise again as if the cold railings had burned him.

'What's wrong?'

A figure, dressed in the white and blue of the Academy, lay prone on the ground in a small pool of blood several blocks away. Hitsugaya felt the blood drain from his head so quickly his surroundings spun for a moment, but he quickly regained his wits and made for the staircase.

'Where are you going?' someone yelled after him.

'Someone's injured!' he yelled back, though he could barely hear himself over the rushing of blood in his ears, so very afraid that he might have been the one to cause the injury. How many attacks had he fired from the roof? How could he be sure that he hadn't hit anyone whenever he missed a target? He ran flat-out to where he had seen the fallen student, arriving short of breath and slightly dizzy. His sheathed sword bumped into his ankle with every step, and got in the way as he crumpled clumsily to his knees on the asphalt. He rolled the person over onto their back, and did a double take when he realised it was Toyoda.

'Where are you hurt?' he asked uncertainly, almost sure he wouldn't get a proper reply.

Sure enough, he only received a garbled groan in response.

Taking a wild guess, Hitsugaya gave Toyoda a prod in the leg, and was rewarded with a curse and an insult he couldn't comprehend. _Aha_ , he thought to himself, and rolled the pant leg up to reveal a deep cut, not unlike the slash of a sharpened claw.

'Who did this?'

'Hollow…attacked.'

'There was a Hollow?' Hitsugaya asked in disbelief, though the more he thought about it, the more obvious it seemed. Take nearly a hundred students, each with high spiritual pressure, and remove them from the protection wards of Seireitei, of course Hollows would be attracted. They were like sitting ducks, untrained and ready for the picking. He was surprised there hadn't been more.

'It's gone now,' Toyoda mumbled. 'Don't know where…'

Hitsugaya found his mind flickering to a book he had read in the library a week ago. It was on healing by _kido_ , a technique commonly used by experienced shinigami, which required at least basic knowledge of the anatomy of the wounded area. By transferring power into the wound, one could force it to heal, to mend flesh and skin and even bone. He recalled what the book had said – to pour concentrated _reiatsu_ into the wound like a liquid, and let it dissipate through the body and repair the tissue.

He had his hands over the slash wound now, glowing and shaking slightly with power, when he faltered.

What, exactly, was the anatomy of a leg supposed to be? He knew it was supposed to be bone to muscle to fat then skin, but he had absolutely no clue where the veins and nerves ran, and had completely forgotten how to differentiate muscles and tendons.

They couldn't possibly both be in the same place, right?

How deep _was_ the cut, anyway?

'Ummm,' Hitsugaya said as he came to a quick moral decision. 'Hold still.'

And he poured out raw, icy power, felt it drain out of him like water from an open tap through his hands and into the wound, and he watched with a strange morbid fascination as the wound slowly closed as the flesh grew and knitted itself together. He was still mildly troubled by the fact that from today onwards, Toyoda's left leg might just be slightly different from the rest of humanity's.

At least he wasn't bleeding out on the floor anymore, Hitsugaya reasoned to himself as he drew back, but he had only seconds more to contemplate the morality of his actions before he heard people running up to him.

'They said someone reported a Hollow! They're suspending the exercise!' he heard someone shout across at him.

Hitsugaya looked up, and found a small crowd of about five people standing awkwardly around.

'Okay, great,' Hitsugaya said and sprang to his feet, pretending that the world wasn't gently spinning around him and hoping that no one would notice. 'You can drag this fat lump back.'

.

Hitsugaya sat uncomfortably in a chair in the office as the Head-of-Year peered at him over his thick glasses. He was a large, bearded man who constantly looked as if he would rather be doing anything else instead of overseeing the education of the hopeless cases he was bound to encounter every year. He set a sheaf of paper that looked distinctly like Hitsugaya's grades from their recent midterms on the table.

'So, Hitsugaya-kun,' the man rumbled while Hitsugaya searched the far corners of his mind for the teacher's name. 'Have you ever considered a career in the Fourth Division?'

He thought about his impressive apathy towards biology and his keen disinterest in maths, both of which were required subjects for students hoping to enter the Fourth. 'No,' he said, possibly a tad too quickly.

'Hm,' he said as he looked down at Hitsugaya's grades again, then up again into his nonplussed face. 'You demonstrated some very impressive healing _kido_ during the exercise, I have heard. Where did you learn to perform it?'

'The, um, library?' Hitsugaya said, only realising how strange he sounded after the words had left his mouth.

'The library?'

'It was in a book,' he supplied, not really liking where the conversation was going. The teacher's bushy eyebrows flew up in an expression Hitsugaya could not read, and he squinted at his grades once more.

'And you never thought about joining the Fourth Division?'

Hitsugaya was sure there was a pained expression written all over his own face. 'I was going to take the History track, Sir.' When they called him to the office, he had been expecting some kind of quick discipline for using an injured classmate as a guinea pig for a spell he had only ever read about once and maybe also for calling said injured classmate a fat lump, not this career counselling he had gotten himself stuck in. He wondered if the canteen would still be serving lunch when the head of year had finally decided to let him _not_ consider the Fourth as a possibility in his future. It felt like he was in severe danger of having to show up for afternoon lessons with neither lunch nor a shower.

'Oh, but you obviously have a flair for healing, if you managed that without any instruction. Every year sees many stellar historians, child, but not many talented healers-'

It was at this moment that his stomach made a terrible sound.

The teacher heaved a defeated sigh, seeming to suddenly remember that every year also saw far more hungry boys than it did stellar historians. 'I shall have a word with your other teachers and instructors,' he said, and dismissed him from the office.

.

That night, the dragon approached him for the first time since he entered the Academy. It had been such a long time – he had almost forgotten that he'd had a dragon problem.

As it turned out, his dragon problem was very much well and alive.

He was alone again, on the plain of ice, surrounded by sheer nothingness in a landscape of dangerous winds. Snow and hail hurtled through the air with a deafening shriek so shrill it drowned out his thoughts, drawing a curtain of sleet so dense he could not see his own hands.

He was barely standing, barefoot in the snow, buffeted by the winds as he waited for the dragon to materialise, all shimmering ice and glittering frost and terrifying majesty, but it did not come. He didn't hear its muffled calls over the storm, nor the shattering crashes of its wings beating in the sky.

He was alone again.

Surprising even himself, Hitsugaya reached his right arm out in front of him – it was but a pale grey shadow in the poor visibility. He let his reach linger, as if willing his outstretched fingers to touch something, anything.

'Where are you?' he asked, a small whisper that left his lips in a shower of frozen breath. And in a voice even softer than the last, he said, 'Why don't you come?'

Nothing happened, and the constant howling of the wind began to recede to the back of his mind where it persisted like white noise. He gave up trying to discern words from the air, and slowly let his arm drop lifelessly back to his side. He closed his eyes, and in the darkness of his mind, he could almost imagine the pale blue dragon before him, with its ruby-red eyes glinting in the darkness, its tail coiled beneath its immense body. Instinctively he reached out once again, only to recoil in shock when his fingertips brushed something cold and hard and metallic. Almost instantly, he was hurled backwards by an unseen force, and he flew through the air, landing harshly on his back and wheezing almost comically as all the air was literally knocked from his lungs.

'You are not ready,' a deep rumbling voice of granite and diamonds tumbling over each other said into his ears. 'You must be stronger yet, child.'

The familiar bone-chilling sound of ice cracking and glass shattering filled the air, but with one arm protectively shielding his face from the intensified storm, Hitsugaya did not see the dragon of the plain of ice. Instead, he was wrenched from the frigid tundra and woke with a jerk to the uncomfortably familiar sensation of being burned by the blankets he slept in.

It was still dark outside, but the lights were on. Hitsugaya realised with an uncanny detachedness that the dormitory was coated like a winter street, and several of his classmates were frozen into their beds, their lips blue from the cold. The windows were frosted shut, and his fingers were an awfully unnatural shade of blue.

He had barely registered that this was all his – no, the dragon's – doing, when the door banged open to reveal about three teachers and one janitor.

'Hitsugaya! Office, now.'


	3. Chapter 3

Hitsugaya was back in the same chair in the same office as that very afternoon, fidgeting uncomfortably and rubbing sleep out of his eyes. The chair was enormous, and his feet hung a distance from the ground, which didn't at all help alleviate the growing sensation in his gut that he was in some form of trouble.

The same man – the head of year, whose name Hitsugaya still couldn't remember – looked disapprovingly down at him from the other side of the desk in the dimly lit office. They – the head, Hitsugaya, the three teachers and the janitor – were all in their pyjamas with the tortured expression of one who had just been unceremoniously thrown out of bed plastered across their faces, and Hitsugaya knew that none of them wanted to be at this meeting any more than he did. Under different circumstances, perhaps it would have been hilarious.

'Explain.'

Hitsugaya opened his mouth, but found that he did not know where to start, so he closed it again.

'Tell me why we shouldn't expel you right now, Hitsugaya Toshiro.'

'I didn't do anyth-' he began to protest, but was immediately interrupted.

'I know you are ahead on your studies and training, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with reading ahead on subjects you have yet to study in class,' the head of year said sternly, 'but if you have been foolish enough to begin practising meditation and attempting to contact your Zanpakuto I will have to put my foot down.'

'I never-'

'Tell me everything you know about _Zanpakuto_ ,' the head of year commanded, his face rapidly turning red with a rage Hitsugaya could not comprehend but was certain had to be unhealthy at such an inane hour of the morning.

He paused for breath, and found that where he had previously been tongue-tied and lost for words, knowledge and facts floated to the surface of his mind with ease, almost as if he was reading from a book in his hands. It was strangely calming, and gave him the opportunity to gather his wits.

' _Zanpakuto_ ,' Hitsugaya said, almost mechanically. 'It's the most important skill for shinigami, because it can be used both offensively and defensively. It's almost always a sword, and most shinigami rely heavily on it during combat. A powerful zanpakuto is a mark of a strong shinigami, but acquiring its skills is the most dangerous obstacle to becoming a full-fledged warrior, and,' He paused for breath, and dared a glance up at the head of year's face before quickly reverting his gaze back to the wood grain in the table. 'And it's dangerous because it's a sentient being, that acts of its own accord and on its own whims, and many people have died fighting them, but if you win, you earn the trust and command of an unrivaled secondary power, and a shinigami with a zanpakuto is essentially two entities fighting as one, which is why-'

Hitsugaya began to falter, his breaths coming up short as his brain caught up with what his mouth was saying. He closed his eyes for a moment, and in the blackness he saw the dragon's gleaming red eyes staring straight back at him, and he nearly fell out of the chair. He tried to recompose himself and finish his sentence. 'Which is why lores and legends refer to them as "the other half of the soul".'

The dragon, he thought with unrepressed panic. It couldn't be – he had never even tried, had known of the dangers of prematurely approaching a zanpakuto, hadn't even known _what_ a zanpakuto was when the dragon first approached him in his dreams. He'd never made the connection until now – it couldn't, _couldn't_ be.

He could hear his own voice echoing eerily in his mind. _"The other half of the soul"_ , they said. The half that wanted to kill him, the half that _would_ kill him if he couldn't prove himself worthy enough.

The deep, still-angry voice of the head of year jerked him away from his disturbing thoughts. 'And tell me, Hitsugaya-kun, what is the primary duty of shinigami?'

He wondered if it was a trick question, but nevertheless offered the textbook answer. 'To protect-'

'Exactly!' the teacher roared in his face, absolutely purple down to the neck. 'So, if you so easily placed the lives of your unsuspecting fellow students in mortal danger for the sole selfish reason of seeking to better your skill, then perhaps you're not qualified to _be_ a shinigami! In which case there is nothing stopping the board from dismissing you this very moment, so you will explain to me now _why_ exactly you saw fit to endanger your classmates in a reckless pursuit, the dangers of which you already fully comprehend!'

Before he knew what he was doing, Hitsugaya had jumped to his feet, his fists curled by his sides as he felt anger of his own rise up in his throat.

'I haven't done _anything_!' he shouted back over the desk. 'It's not my fault there's a dragon trying to kill me in my sleep, it comes looking for me, and it's driving me crazy! They said that if I came to the Academy I would learn how to keep it under control, but if you're going to throw me out because of the problem you were supposed to fix, then by all means, do! Shall I leave now?'

He was panicking now, and had no clue what he could do if the school did kick him out. He couldn't return home – not when he knew full well that this dragon would eventually kill his grandmother before it killed him.

The head of year was observing his outburst distinctly more calmly than before. Hitsugaya glared at him with all the ferocity he could muster, and thought he saw the man stiffen slightly.

'Sit,' he said, and Hitsugaya despaired. They were going to expel him, and he would be left on his own to find out how to stop this dragon from hunting him down. He hoisted himself back onto the chair and brought his knees up to his chest, disregarding the look of disapproval he got for putting his feet on the chair.

The prolonged silence that followed was suffocatingly tense.

'Who told you to enrol in the Academy?' the teacher asked him.

Hitsugaya hesitated a moment before answering. None of the teachers in this room had been present during his admission examination, and he wondered if nobody had bothered to inform them. 'Vice-captain Matsumoto and Captain Kyoraku.'

The moment he uttered the names, a shocked hush enveloped the room, and the head of year looked as if he had just eaten a goldfish. '…I must arrange a meeting,' he mumbled at length before turning to address one of the teachers by the door. 'Katase, take him to the nurse's office.'

And with that, Hitsugaya found himself being gently ushered down the corridor with a blanket over his shoulders, having miraculously survived a shouting match with a figure of authority. He wondered if he would go down in Academy history as an urban legend, for freezing a dormitory of boys into their beds and then living to tell the tale.

.

.

Hitsugaya was sitting in a soft armchair in the nurse's office, blowing the steam off his third cup of tea, when the sun finally began to rise. He had been told to stay there until further instruction, even if it meant skipping training and afternoon classes, so he had proceeded to set up camp in one of the good armchairs with a stack of books scavenged from every corner of the office and a large kettle, and was left to wonder who – he, or the head of year – was in a bigger pickle.

Every so often one of the medical staff would pass by, and several students with varying degrees of illness (feigned or otherwise, he could not tell) dropped in, and though they mostly ignored him, he knew that none of them could help staring at the book he was reading.

Admittedly, he would have stared too, Hitsugaya conceded to himself, for the office and sick bay had a dismally limited supply of books lying around, and the dusty tome he was currently flipping through had the words _The Philosophy of Ancient Remedies_ emblazoned across the front. It was terribly boring and didn't make much sense, but was still a hundred times better and far less ego-slaying than _Fashion Trends and Great Make-up Tips (Free pouch inside!)_ , so he resolutely turned yet another page and set the kettle going.

He was in the seventh century, reading about superstitions regarding goat's blood and tortoise shells, when the door clattered open and a rumpled student peered in. After a double-take at the book Hitsugaya was reading, he asked, 'Are you Hitsugaya?'

He nodded.

'Here, I'm supposed to give you this,' the other student said, and handed him a sheet of paper before running off.

It was, as far as he could tell, a simple survey. With a shrug, Hitsugaya filled it in without much thought, and scribbled in his choice of major and preferred secondary subjects, before he screeched to a sudden stop at the last question.

Which division did he want to join? What kind of question was that?

Definitely one he hadn't even thought of thinking about.

Eventually, he decided to leave it blank, and resumed his idle perusal of the awful book on terrible remedies, which seemed to make less and less sense with every chapter. He lost track of exactly how much time had passed, and was nearly falling asleep as the senseless words blurred before him, an illegible mess of old ink on yellowed paper. His eyes slid closed and-

With the howl of a gale ripping through the air and yet at the same time the silence of an unstirred night, he found a pair of dark, depthless, blood-red eyes staring straight into him through the darkness.

This time, he did fall out of his chair.

Hitsugaya fell in a heap on the floor, both hands clutched to his chest – whether it was to force his heart rate down or to see if his heart was still beating, he couldn't really be sure – and the heavy book landed on his head with a cloud of ancient dust. While he spluttered from the dust and recovered from the shock, the door clattered open and a veritable army of teachers and administrative authorities stepped into the room. Putting it mildly, Hitsugaya thought dryly as he dusted himself off with the air of someone who hadn't just crashed to the ground, they looked slightly stunned.

.

.

The next chair he sat in was in the headmaster's office. The headmaster wasn't actually very old, but he had the same weathered look about his eyes as some much older people, and the same wrinkle between the eyebrows that Hitsugaya noticed many of the teachers had, although perhaps that was just when they were dealing with hopeless students. By the corner of the desk, the head of year stood behind the headmaster, overshadowing him in sheer presence.

A little golden plaque by the corner of the desk read "Maeda", which was really helpful since Hitsugaya would not have otherwise known the headmaster's name. The head of year could do with one of those things, he thought.

Unsure where to start, Hitsugaya edged the survey he had been given across the heavy wooden desk, apprehensive as if the wood would burn him at any moment.

The headmaster's moustache twitched as he looked at what Hitsugaya had written, but put the paper aside. Hitsugaya noticed that the now-battered letter Kyoraku had written also lay tiredly on the desk, as if it had been passed from hand to hand and read and re-read countless times. He tried to forget where Matsumoto had first stashed it, but it seemed to be a memory to stay.

'The board has convened a meeting about you, Hitsugaya-kun. Am I correct in saying that your _zanpakuto_ is contacting you?'

He nodded.

'Since when?'

'Last winter,' he replied almost immediately.

'And you have had absolutely no control over the situation?'

'Still don't,' he huffed stiffly.

'Hmm.'

Hitsugaya wanted to jump out of his seat and shake the headmaster until something rattled. He was fed up with waiting, fed up with sitting in chairs for unnecessarily long periods of time, and mostly absolutely done with how slowly everything was happening. Old men hmm-ing at him was not at all what he wanted, and the next question baffled him.

'Did you ever touch a shinigami's sword before last winter?'

'…No?'

'Hmm.'

Hitsugaya nearly screamed, but kept his expression stoic and his mouth shut because the headmaster had already begun to speak.

'You may not know this, but the link between a soul and a zanpakuto does not form unless the soul has had contact with a sword. Any insights?'

He stared squarely into the headmaster's eyes – for some reason he was easier to intimidate than the head of year – and said firmly, 'No.'

'Most peculiar indeed,' the headmaster heaved a sigh, and took a sip of tea before proceeding. 'The board has decided to accelerate you,' he said. 'That is to say, you will skip as many grades as your current standard allows and begin spiritual training with the upperclassmen, so we will conduct some diagnostic tests right now, which is where this comes in,' and he reached for the survey. He tapped the blank field at the bottom, and said, 'Captain Shiba of the Tenth Division has offered to train you once you have graduated. Perhaps you should consider the Tenth.'

Hitsugaya sort of vaguely understood. They wanted him out of their hands and into Seireitei where he could focus on his training with superiors far more capable and experienced in the field, and if he were to skip grades, naturally they would want him to uphold the academic standards expected of everyone else.

He listened carefully as the headmaster explained how the tests would be carried out, what they entailed, and how things would change depending on how many grades he skipped and which subjects he chose to study.

'Ah, the history track,' the headmaster said pleasantly as he squinted at the piece of paper. Behind him, the head of year frowned. 'A popular one, yes…' and his smile froze almost comically as he looked at what Hitsugaya had written for his secondary subject.

'Modern Studies?'

'Nobody said I couldn't,' Hitsugaya pointed out. 'And there _are_ people with this combination.' He decided not to mention that he also knew it had been three years since someone had taken both History and Modern Studies, mostly because it was doomed to be a timetabling disaster.

'Not Social Studies?'

'No?'

'Ancient Literature?'

' _Never_.'

'Very well,' the headmaster said with obvious resignation, though he didn't sound as if anything was well at all.

.

.

Hitsugaya sped through the tests with the uncertainty of one who had not studied and the brutal swiftness of one who knew all the answers anyway. Then they moved to an empty practice field, where he conjured spell after spell, sending various fireballs of energy towards target after target. The physical strain was taking its toll – he was tired, and the sky was streaked with golden ribbons of setting sun – and when it was finally over, all he wanted was to lie in the dry grass and sleep.

He considered voicing out this desire, but before he could, everything turned a fierce, blinding white, and a familiar screech of the wind wrapped around him, drowning out everything else.

This time, he was keenly aware of sounds other than the wind. Beyond the deafening crashes of what he knew was ice, shattering and freezing and shattering again, he heard thunder in the skies, of enormous wings beyond his imagination beating against the wind.

He felt every pulse of the wings in the beat of his heart, and felt the air around him move with the dragon, and though he did not see anything beyond the opaque sleet that tossed about, he knew the dragon was near. Its roars were a rushing in his ears, its breaths an echo in his heart, its movements a fingertip's brush away.

He learned to relish in the cold, for its biting sting was no longer an unwelcome pain but a present reminder that he was _alive_ , that the dragon had yet to kill him. He was doing _fine_.

This time, he knew not to reach out for the dragon, and instead lifted his hands to let the powder-soft snow flit through his fingers, stinging the raw skin under the tips of his fingernails, melting on his cold palms. There was a strange serenity in the erratic storm, a perplexing calm despite the knowledge that he was in danger. Letting the frigid air fill his lungs, he felt the storm simultaneously drain his energy and rejuvenate his exhaustion, and in the moment where he let his eyes slip closed, the coldness withdrew its harsh grasp and left him disoriented and bewildered and very much awake in the training field.

It seemed that almost no time had lapsed, as his eyes slid out of their focus on his outstretched arm and he saw the headmaster walking towards the school building a short distance away from him, as if he hadn't just slipped off to a separate dimension and then come back.

Afternoon lessons were long over, and other students milled about the corridors, occasionally giving him strange looks as he threaded through the sparse crowd, trailing in the wake of the headmaster, dirty and sweaty and seemingly lost. At some point he had been dismissed, and though he couldn't quite remember the specifics of the evening, he was glad to finally be in the shower room.

So there he was, alone in the shower, using up all the hot water to defrost the tips of his fingers and hopefully ward the ice dragon off, and in the steamed-up mirror he swore he saw a bump on his head from where the book had fallen on him. He stayed there until the hum of the boiler was silenced and the hot water slowly turned tepid and then cold, before finally towelling off and getting dressed. He stopped to cover the bruise on his forehead with his hair, and returned to the dormitory.

Hitsugaya walked through the doorway, only to be met by a room of perplexed stares and slack jaws that followed him as he walked to his bunk.

'Um…hi?' he greeted hesitantly, not quite understanding the situation.

Eventually, one of the students broke the silence. 'What are you doing here?'

'I, uh, sleep here? I didn't think I'd be forgotten so quickly.' _Not after last night_ , he thought.

'No, I mean, they moved all your stuff out.'

'Yeah,' someone else chimed in from the other side of the room. 'We all thought they'd expelled you for sure.'

Hitsugaya whipped around to see that they were, in fact, right. The bed he had occupied just last night had been stripped of its sheets, his locker emptied and his school things gone.

His jaw dropped.

They couldn't have expelled him, or if they did, the certainly could have done it without all the exams they had just put him through.

And they'd taken all his things! There were three library books in there, and now all he had was a damp towel and a bare mattress. Out of disbelief, Hitsugaya swung his locker door once more, just to make sure they had really taken _all_ his things and not just, you know, his pillow and blanket and bed sheet and shoes and basically everything he owned – it was then that a flimsy piece of paper fluttered out of the empty locker and landed at his feet.

_Hitsugaya Toshiro_  
(1) You have been reassigned to Dormitory 302. Your belongings have already been relocated.  
(2) You may take the morning off to rest tomorrow.  
(3) Following this evening's examinations, you have been assigned the following classes:  
History, Modern Studies: 6A  
Demon Arts (Practical and Theory), Advanced Tactical Studies: 4A  
Sword Arts, Physical Combat, Elementary Meditation: 3A

Hitsugaya quickly folded the note, terrified of what his peers would say if they knew he was being thrown several years ahead, terrified of what it meant to _be_ thrown several years ahead, and grabbed the towel he had dropped.

'I, uh, I've been moved,' he announced to nobody in particular, because everyone had stopped and stared while he read the note, and then wordlessly excused himself.

'To where?' A voice he recognised as Toyoda's sneered loudly. 'Rukongai?' A few boys laughed.

Hitsugaya threw them a scathing look and said venomously, 'Wouldn't you like to know,' before slamming the door loudly behind him.

.

.

Hitsugaya was in a bad mood even before lessons began. 302 had turned out to be a decrepit little room on the other end of the block from the regular mass dorms, with a bunk bed and two desks. Since he was its only occupant (he figured the school didn't want to place any of its students under further risk of sudden and unwanted cryogenic accidents) he had conveniently used the top bunk as storage, and within an hour of him moving in, the top bunk was strewn with books and paper. He also quickly discovered that the room was _ridiculously_ far from the bathrooms, the windows were stiff in their fixings, and that the wooden sliding door derailed regularly.

He did consider relocating himself to another room, on the one chance that the school had somehow given him a terrible one by accident, but 301 didn't have glass in its windows, 303 didn't have a desk, and 304's door practically fell to pieces when he tried to open it. He had given up, and decided to show up early for class, which, in hindsight, was not the greatest idea he'd ever had.

'Hey midget, you lost?' It was as if all of these egoistic morons operated on the same system; it was day one at the Academy all over again.

Hitsugaya looked around, and found his new tormentor to be a tall and visibly stronger older student. (He was beginning to detect a trend among these dull bully types.) The older student's face was pulled into a slack, condescending smile as he looked down his nose from where he sat on one of the tables.

Hitsugaya shifted his books under one arm, and shot back coldly, 'Is this 6A?'

A girl sitting near the front nodded, which was all he needed.

'Then no, I'm _not_ lost. I'm here for class, so maybe you could get lost for a change?'

'No, no, don't get me wrong. I'm Arita, kind and generous and studious sixth-year who is about to guide you through the rest of the school year. We should be best of friends,' he said, smooth as snake oil.

Hitsugaya took a step back. This was…vastly different from day one. 'Er…No?'

Arita swung his feet off the desk and sauntered over to him, bending down to sling an arm over his shoulder. 'Heeyy, don't be so uptight. Everyone's heard the rumours, you know. Hitsugaya Toshiro, genius black horse from Rukongai, everyone says you're going to be the next Ichimaru Gin.'

'Fantastic,' he groaned, unable to be bothered to care that he didn't have a clue who Ichimaru Gin was and what he did, and gingerly extricated himself from under Arita's lanky arm. 'I am going to sit somewhere else.'

He spent the rest of the afternoon in the back row by the window, mercifully far away from most of the students, making notes as the lecturer droned on about politics and the monarchy. Most of what the teacher was saying was already printed in the textbook, and Hitsugaya soon found himself idly creating a parallel timeline of a different time period in his notes. By the time the lesson was over, the page was a mess of scribbles and coloured lines that rendered even the neatest handwriting nearly illegible, and he was so absorbed that he didn't notice that there was someone hovering behind his back until it was too late.

'Are you Hitsugaya Toshiro, the super genius everyone's been talking about since yesterday?'

He jumped at the voice, and looked up to see a tall (okay, he admitted to himself, they were all tall) boy with dark hair leaning against the desk. _Not another one_.

'So what? Who are _you_ and what do you want?' he snapped irritably.

'Kusaka Sojiro,' he said, and extended a hand for a handshake that Hitsugaya did not take. After several awkward moments of silence, he retracted the hand and pointed at Hitsugaya's notes. 'Just thought you'd like to know that the fall of the third royal family wasn't because of the war.'

Hitsugaya stared.

'And also that you might want to merge this with a timeline from China too,' Kusaka continued, completely unruffled by his outright rudeness.

Hitsugaya slammed his notebook shut and turned his stare into a glare. 'What do you want?' he demanded again.

'I thought- Maybe-' Kusaka's smile faltered and he began mumbling, and although they had never spoken before, Hitsugaya could tell that this was uncharacteristic of him. 'Do you want to be friends?'

Hitsugaya found himself subconsciously looking in Arita's direction.

'No, no nothing like that idiot over there,' Kusaka blurted. 'Trust me, I've spent the better part of five years fending him off.'

At that moment, Arita waved blithely, and Hitsugaya realised that _Kusaka_ was the name he'd seen at the top of all the sixth-year class rankings all year.

'If everybody's all falling over themselves to be your friend, why do you need me, anyway?' Hitsugaya said accusingly as he swept his belongings into a bag and scooped up his books, but stopped when Kusaka looked genuinely hurt.

'I thought you of all people would know what it's like to- to be constantly surrounded by people but constantly alone for being different,' he said seriously. 'To have friends who turned out to not actually be friends.'

'I'll have you know,' Hitsugaya began slowly, 'that nobody's been my friend for more than two hours. The instant betrayal is almost painless.'

'I think I can manage two hours,' Kusaka laughed, and offered his hand once again. This time, Hitsugaya stood and took it, and for the first time in his life, he felt as if maybe some people weren't so bad after all.

'Come on, Toshiro, with two of us? We're going to destroy the bell curve.'


	4. Chapter 4

The most surprising thing about friendship, Hitsugaya had come to realise over several days, was that he spent a large proportion of his time in actual human company rather than being acknowledged (if he was lucky) and then avoided like the plague.

It began at lunch the next day, after he had spent the morning with the third years attempting to meditate and seeing nothing but the backs of his eyelids. Over the course of three hours sitting cross-legged on a hard cushion on the tatami floor with the instructor reminding them to locate their inner centre and "commune" with the "other dimensions", Hitsugaya decided he was justly frustrated with the world. He'd nearly forgotten he'd made a friend after class yesterday, until Kusaka found him in the canteen and slid into the seat opposite him.

'Why do you look like you're about to murder someone?' he asked.

'No I don't,' Hitsugaya said as calmly as he could muster.

Kusaka laughed. 'Okay, so why do you look like someone's taken your dessert?'

Hitsugaya set down his chopsticks before he had the chance to start jabbing them angrily in the air at innocent passers-by, and sighed. 'Do you think that this "communing with the other dimensions" thing is utter rubbish?'

It seemed to be the wrong thing to ask in public, because before he could even finish his sentence, Kusaka was doubled up on the bench clutching his sides and practically howling with laughter.

'What did I say? Have you gone mad?' he asked, completely bewildered, but when Kusaka didn't reply, he decided he'd have to wait for him to stop laughing. When he finally emerged from under the table flushed and dishevelled and slightly out of breath, Kusaka picked up his chopsticks and began eating.

'You're going to choke,' Hitsugaya pointed out hesitantly, still not quite sure what to make of the situation. Was he that bad at socialising?

'You catch on fast,' Kusaka said through a mouthful of vegetables, only to be met with an incredulous stare of incomprehension. 'I mean,' he clarified, 'that you're right. It's nonsense, but it usually takes everyone at least two weeks to find out.'

'If it's nonsense, why do they teach it, and why do we spend weeks on it?'

'If you don't realise your efforts are futile, then you're not working hard enough. Simple as that,' Kusaka shrugged.

'So we fall asleep inhaling incense smoke pretending to meditate so we can finally start actual meditation?' Hitsugaya asked suspisciously.

'Well, since you've already figured it out, I doubt you'll be pretending much longer.' Noticing the dissatisfied look on his friend's face, Kusaka added, 'And I could show you how in the evenings.'

'Really?'

'Sure, but for that, I'll be taking this.' Kusaka reached across the table to swipe the sweet steamed cake off the corner of Hitsugaya's tray. He tore the wrapping off and took a large bite while Hitsugaya watched.

'How do you know I'm not going to murder you for taking my dessert?'

Kusaka choked.

And that was how their daily training sessions began, and also how Hitsugaya lost a year's worth of steamed cakes.

.

.

After class, which was a dreadfully boring afternoon on Kido theory with the fourth years, Hitsugaya collected his _asauchi_ from his locker and found Kusaka waiting for him in one of the smaller training rooms.

'Glad to see you didn't forget,' the older boy joked, most probably referring to how Hitsugaya had forgotten about him earlier that day, or maybe it was about his uncanny inability to remember things that weren't printed in textbooks. Hitsugaya decided the two issues were probably related.

'Very funny.'

'I know, I try.'

Hitsugaya rolled his eyes and bent to set his things down on the floor, but was forced to drop everything when a small, very hard cushion stuffed to the seams with dried beans came flying at his face from across the room, where Kusaka was standing by a large pile of similar cushions and laughing.

He took aim, and lobbed the sack of beans back to where it came from. It missed Kusaka by a good metre, but when it punched into the precarious stack behind and promptly caused an avalanche of awful cushions, he couldn't help the grin that spread across his face.

'Okay, okay, I surrender,' Kusaka said. 'What do you want?'

'Teach me everything you know,' he demanded.

Kusaka paused. 'Show me what you know first,' he said, and miraculously found an empty spot on the floor amidst the cushions to sit.

Frowning, Hitsugaya snatched the nearest cushion and sat on it. He swore it was even harder than the first one, but tried to ignore it and shifted so he sat only on the front half of the cushion, and folded his legs neatly on either side of it. Then he carefully laid his sword on the floor before him, let his hands fall into his lap, and with his eyes closed, he took a few deep breaths before cracking one eye open.

'And then,' he deadpanned. 'We fall asleep.'

'You can't,' Kusaka pointed out. 'That's not the point.'

'Well, that's what I did this morning.'

'It's not happening again. Close your eyes.'

'Am I really paying you a year's worth of steamed cakes?'

'I'm worth at least three years of dessert, so stop complaining and close your eyes.'

Hitsugaya scowled, but complied.

'Now,' Kusaka said in a much more serious tone, 'I want you to visualise your _reiatsu_ as something tangible. What form does it take?'

Thunder rolled in the back of his mind, and between towers of ice that crystallised out of nothing and rising clouds that spread across the breadth of his mind, what rose to the forefront was water – endless, depthless, gentle waves that pulsed softly with his every breath.

'Water,' he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

'Water,' Kusaka echoed, and Hitsugaya heard the sounds of pages being flipped. 'What kind?'

What _kind_?

'Um, still water?'

'Okay, try imagining a small pebble sinking through the water.'

As the pebble sank lower and lower into the deeper, darker depths of the endless water, a warm blue light began to filter in from above, and between the dizzying shafts of light that refracted back and forth, the water began to thin into a veil, and beyond that veil, Hitsugaya realised with a gasp, was the landscape he had become so familiar with in his dreams.

Yet the moment he realised this, the spell broke. The water fell away and the pale light grew in intensity to become the light of the room he was in, and he was back in reality, broken from the dream. His legs were numb beneath him, and when he touched his sword, it was ice cold.

'Wow,' Kusaka marvelled, and Hitsugaya started at the voice. 'Where have you been?'

Hitsugaya looked around, and realised that the lights had been lit and that it was dark outside, and Kusaka had surrounded himself with several assignments in the corner of the room.

'I…I'm not really sure,' Hitsugaya lied. 'How did you get so good?'

Kusaka shrugged, and handed him a book from the floor. 'I just tried what worked for me. What did you see?'

Hitsugaya bit his lip – he had told Kusaka that his _reiatsu_ regularly went out of control, and that it manifested in wintry gusts and frigid ice, but had been too afraid to tell anyone that his _zanpakuto_ was the one causing it, too afraid to tell anyone about the dreams eating away at his sanity, about the dragon eating away at his heart.

So he told Kusaka everything he saw, but didn't say a word about how he'd seen the barren wasteland of ice before, or about how he'd stood there countless times. Just that it was the first time he'd seen it, and that it seemed like a terrible place.

Whatever reaction he was expecting from the taller student, it was not the pat on the head and ruffling of his hair that he received.

'Awesome!' he said excitedly. 'You really are a genius, aren't you?'

'It's not awesome,' Hitsugaya grumbled as he made a grab for the hand that was messing up his hair. 'We have an essay due tomorrow, I can't believe you didn't wake me.'

'I figured you were done,' Kusaka shrugged. 'Since you spent all afternoon on it instead of paying attention in class.'

Hitsugaya squinted at his friend as he contemplated this information. 'Does that mean you weren't paying attention either?'

'Aha! So you _are_ done!'

He buried his face in his hands, but let Kusaka drag him off to dinner despite his rather unconvincing theory that skipping dinner made people short, because he decided he would rather not take his chances on that front.

.

.

The next day, they ravaged the library until the librarian kicked them out.

'There are two of you now?' she had asked with the most scandalised look on her face as they entered that afternoon, obviously not reliving pleasant memories of all the past instances in which she had to forcibly evict Hitsugaya from the premises so she could close for the day.

'Yes,' Kusaka said boldly but pleasantly. 'May we please use the reference section today?'

'Is there a particular book you are looking for?' the librarian asked suspisciously.

They exchanged what could easily have been misinterpreted as guilty glances.

'"The Development of Technology in Soul Society",' Kusaka said at the exact same time Hitsugaya said '"The History of Forbidden Practices".'

The librarian heaved a sigh. 'You,' she said to Kusaka. 'That's in the general lending section. And you,' she said to Hitsugaya, 'Are you mad?'

Hitsugaya tried not to hate Kusaka for slinking off to the general lending section in one smooth getaway, and turned to give the librarian his most innocent, pleading look as he supplied the least of the shabby excuses he could come up with on the spot. 'Preliminary research for my graduation thesis…?'

They ended up at a table, an air of defeat and a dusty volume of _The Development of Technology_ between them.

'Well, it was worth a shot,' Kusaka said at length.

'She said I need a signed note from a teacher. Apparently the reference section is in the Central Library in Seireitei, and it takes weeks to process a book from them.'

'Oh.'

'She also said I should do something less illegal for my thesis.'

Kusaka sighed wistfully. 'I did so want to believe our school had a secret basement. I have been disillusioned forever.'

Hitsugaya shrugged, and pulled several books from a nearby shelf, including the fifth years' textbook on _Kido_ , which he promptly opened. 'Maybe the Central Library has a secret basement,' he said absently.

Kusaka stared at him. 'You haven't even been taking year four classes for a week, why on earth are you reading ahead?'

'Class is boring; I don't like the fourth year students.'

'You don't like anybody.'

'Good point.'

They spent the rest of the day in silence, each so absorbed in their own work that they didn't notice when daylight faded into night. The soft flickering light of the lamps glowed a warm yellow, and the sounds of dry pages being turned every so often echoed in the silence. Hitsugaya was just about done with the textbook – he had copied down the main points from all but the last chapter, and written down the incantations for most of the spells in the syllabus, when the librarian descended upon them.

'For the third time tonight,' she scolded even before she reached their table, 'The library closed fifteen minutes ago!'

True enough, Hitsugaya thought as he looked around the library, it was mostly darkened and deserted, though he did not recall if the librarian had attempted to kick them out twice already.

'It can't have closed fifteen minutes ago thrice in the past half an hour,' Kusaka observed, pulling his nose from a particularly thick book.

'The canteen is closing soon,' the librarian said in a rapid change of tactic. 'I know you boys haven't eaten.'

'Eating is overrated,' Hitsugaya said under his breath, but started packing up anyway. The last thing he wanted was to be permanently barred from the library, though he had a sneaking suspicion that the librarian wasn't about to ban him any time soon or she would have already done so.

Kusaka selected three books from the pile on their table and said, 'I'd like to borrow these, please.'

Wordlessly, Hitsugaya picked up another book and moved to add it to Kusaka's stack, but was rudely stopped by the librarian. 'I'm not raising your borrowing limit again, Hitsugaya,' she said sternly, plucking the book out of his grasp and placing it on the book trolley behind her. 'You can come back tomorrow.'

Kusaka gave him a strange look, and Hitsugaya shrugged helplessly.

.

.

The following day, they holed up in one of the training rooms and sparred, during which Hitsugaya discovered that all the tricks he'd pulled on his classmates were completely ineffective against Kusaka.

After peeling himself off the mat for what must have been the millionth time in the past hour, he wiped the sweat off his brow on his sleeve and adjusted his grip on the wooden sword. He crouched slightly, his feet shoulder-width apart, and steadied his stance while he studied Kusaka.

He knew the theory, knew that strength was not the most important in sword arts. _Ichigan, Nisoku, Santan, Shiriki_ , he recited to himself. Before strength came decisiveness and quick thinking and strong footwork and attention to detail. They had learnt it during their first training session – it made perfect sense, yet Hitsugaya had yet to figure out how to apply it.

Hitsugaya grit his teeth. Never take your eyes off the opponent; always, _always_ watch their body language, he reminded himself. The most skilled swordsmen were the sharpest observers. He switched the grip on his sword again, trading his posture for offensive strike for a defensive one.

'Attack me,' he said to Kusaka, who stopped short and nearly tripped.

'What?'

'You heard me. I'm not going to learn anything from _me_ , so I think that leaves only you.'

'I'm not entirely sure hurling yourself into the deep end is the way to go with sword arts,' Kusaka informed him.

Hitsugaya bit his lip, but did not budge. After a moment's hesitation, he said, 'I'll be fine. Go on.'

'You're mad.'

'I'm _waiting_.'

'And also mad.'

'Okay, fine, I'm mad, but also ready. Do your worst.'

Whatever confidence in his chances of survival that Hitsugaya had managed to previously summon quickly drained away when Kusaka threw his weight forward and swung back for a hit that he could never in a million years dodge. Hitsugaya snapped his wooden sword parallel to his torso and dropped to the mat in a quick roll. In an impromptu adaptation of a manouvre he'd used countless times on the other first-years, Hitsugaya stopped mid-roll by flinging his right leg outwards, and tried to hook his foot around Kusaka's ankle. He missed, and ended up taking a hit to the shoulder and a consecutive follow-up in the lower back.

They concluded the evening at the nurse's office.

'I told you it was a bad idea,' Kusaka said apologetically, pulling a first-aid kit from one of the cupboards and deftly tossing a bottle of disinfectant to Hitsugaya. They were both sweaty and dirty and still carrying their practice swords, and on the receiving end of disapproving looks from the nurse. Hitsugaya gave the bottle his own look of suspiscion and disapproval, but grabbed a cotton pad and reluctantly popped the lid open anyway.

'Hey, I'm alive, you're alive; if anything's going to kill anyone it's this,' Hitsugaya said, gesturing at the poisonous shade of blue of the disinfectant soaking the cotton.

Kusaka laughed, and sank into the too-soft sofa next to him. 'I'm pretty sure that's actually poisonous.'

'Yep, says right here,' Hitsugaya said, pretending to read off the label on the bottle. '"Do not drink. Causes immediate death, indirectly due to idiocy and subsequent eternal embarrassment".'

'No inflammation?'

'No, in fact, this appears to alleviate most severe cases of overinflated egos. Useful.'

Kusaka smacked him on the head with a roll of gauze. 'The healers would be appalled at your rudeness,' he said jokingly. 'Now are you or are you not going to fix yourself before that cotton pad dries up?'

So while he disinfected and dried and covered up various scrapes and grazes, Kusaka shifted to a nearby armchair and picked up the closest book with a certain apprehension and distaste. '"Fashion Trends and Great Make-up tips"?' he read off the cover. 'Who reads this stuff?' Then he shook the magazine, and when no free pouch fell out from inside, contrary to what the cover proclaimed, he replaced it gingerly back on the shelf where Hitsugaya had left it weeks ago.

'You should get the one on philosophy. Destroys less brain cells, I think,' Hitsugaya told him. 'Not too sure about the goat's blood and monkey skulls chapter though.'

'Monkey skulls?

'And mashed caterpillars. Come on, I'm done.' He slammed the first-aid kit shut and stood to leave, only to be fixed with a fierce glare from the nurse at the desk. Unsure if it was because of his loudness, or their brazen discussion of monkey skulls, or his disrespect for the kit, he grimaced sheepishly and held the kit out to the nurse as if it were some sort of peace offering.

The nurse took the box from him and gave both of them a stern look. 'I certainly hope not to see either of you in here anytime soon,' she said as they shuffled out the door.

.

.

It was the most peaceful of days Hitsugaya had ever known. They trained, they studied, they messed around, they trained some more, then they destroyed the bell curve, and then they destroyed it even more. It wasn't just peaceful, he realised.

It was _fun_.

Sure, every time they sparred he got his ass kicked, but with every passing week he knew it was taking Kusaka longer and longer to beat him, knew that he was one more step closer to effectively countering yet another one of Kusaka's killer strikes.

It was the week before the spring term finals when he won his first spar. Kusaka took several moments to wipe the look of shock off his face and re-hinge his jaw, but when he did, he grabbed Hitsugaya by the shoulders and shook him with a vigour Hitsugaya didn't know he possessed.

'That was awesome!' Kusaka yelled right into his face, along with some other very excited exclamations that he didn't quite catch, then let go as if a switch somewhere had been flipped. 'Oh, speaking of awesome, guess what?'

'What?'

'The school gave me a one-off job. A _job_. You know what that means?'

Hitsugaya shook his head, still not quite over the euphoria of winning his first spar and not quite keeping up with the sudden change of subject.

Kusaka's eyes were practically shining. ' _Money_ ,' he said. 'Imagine all the things you could _do_.'

'How much are they paying you?' Hitsugaya asked out of curiosity.

'Uh…two thousand kan…'

Completely against his will and his desire to be a supportive friend, Hitsugaya burst out laughing, and laughed until his sides hurt. 'That'll get you, what, one nice meal at the nice restaurant in Seireitei?'

'Or ten pairs of socks from the market.'

'Well, what are they paying you to do, that you'll end up needing ten pairs of new socks?'

'I'm supposed to be someone's sparring partner for an exam. Guess they had an odd number or something,' Kusaka said casually as he wiped his sword down with a dry towel.

Hitsugaya dropped his sword in shock. 'Oh _shit_.'

Kusaka stopped mid-ramble and took a wild look around, as if he expected something to be burning down.

'I'd completely forgotten,' Hitsugaya said in a jumble of words so quick Kusaka nearly didn't catch what he had said. 'Fujita-sensei told me to meet him in his office at six, something about this term's finals-' He wrestled off the protective pads he'd had on his forearms and shins, and spared a glance for the window where the almost-summer sun hung low in the sky amidst thick patches of clouds, as if it could tell him the time. Meanwhile, Kusaka reasonably turned around to fish a watch out of his bag.

'Well,' he told Hitsugaya quite frankly, 'You have about negative eight minutes to get there.'

Hitsugaya swore violently and took off running.

.

.

Hitsugaya arrived a good negative eleven minutes early.

The Demon Arts teacher's office was straight and tidy, not a single book or pen out of place, and Hitsugaya was becoming increasingly aware of his post-training dishevelled state, his lateness, and also the fact that he'd forgotten his shoes in the training room.

Fujita looked at him with what appeared to be a half-amused smile on his face. 'Hitsugaya-kun,' he greeted pleasantly, as if he wasn't dealing with a late and smelly and oddly shoeless student. 'I see you are working as hard as ever.'

Unsure how to respond, Hitsugaya replied with a most eloquent 'Er…'

Fujita waved a hand in the air, and Hitsugaya tried to convince himself that he wasn't trying to ventilate the stench of the training room from his air space. 'I understand you have been studying ahead of the class,' the teacher said. 'Given your current scores, I was thinking of pushing you ahead to the Fifth Year course starting next term. Of course, this means you'll be taking additional tests this term, but what do you think?'

While his brain caught up with the situation, his mouth said, 'If you see fit, sir.'

'Excellent, I shall have a word with your head of year and other instructors.'

And that was how the chaos that was his finals schedule spiralled endlessly downwards.

Evidently they had had more than just a word in the staff room, because suddenly Hitsugaya found himself speaking with a lot of teachers. First it was just Demon Arts, then it was Tactical Studies, then Combat, and it finally all snowballed into a large disaster. They couldn't fit everything into finals week, so he ended up with a finals _fortnight_ , and by the time he received his schedule, there was no backing out.

'If you ever need a stunt double,' Kusaka offered jokingly while they were in the library, 'I'm always here if you've got ten pairs of socks to pay me.'

'Sorry, I'm still in crippling debt,' Hitsugaya declined. 'Someone's got a monopoly over my dessert for another nine months.'

'I'm sure they've got reasons,' Kusaka said loftily as he picked up another book, and Hitsugaya rolled his eyes.

In Kusaka's defence, Hitsugaya had to admit, he was more than keeping up with his end of the deal. On the official last day of finals week, and therefore the start of Hitsugaya's extra exams, Kusaka burst into his room after dinner, a large stack of books in tow and brandishing a library card.

'Guess what!' He announced as the door nearly fell off the framework and Hitsugaya nearly fell off the chair he had been sitting in. 'I talked the librarian into doubling your lending credit just for this week! So, I borrowed these for you,' and he dropped the stack on the desk.

Hitsugaya looked at the books, at Kusaka, back at the books, and then zoomed in on the yellow card in Kusaka's hand. 'Did you steal my library card?' he asked suspiciously. 'They refused to let me in today.'

'I harbour only honourable intentions. Now, for just seven days from today, you can have twelve library books at any one time!'

It was the longest seven days of his life, and Hitsugaya had never seen so many books in his room before. Between cramming knowledge into his head and practising endlessly in the training room and on the field, the days passed in a whirlwind of busyness and the end of the term came as a welcome reprieve.

Throughout the summer, Hitsugaya struggled with a problem he had been putting off for far too long. With the lull in what used to be a both mentally and physically rigorous schedule, the dragon was back to the forefront of his subconsciousness, haunting his sleep and plaguing his dreams. He would wake in cold sweat, fingers blue and knees shaking but his skin burning, his heart pounding in his ears and his vision swimming behind his eyelids, the dragon's eerie voice of icicles tumbling over each other and the thunderous beating of enormous wings ringing in his mind.

He would brush the frost off the sheets and let warm, humid air into the room, and take a steaming hot shower to drive away the cold.

It was the best he could do.

The season of summer rain had come and gone before he had the chance to acknowledge it; the once strikingly blue and flaming purple bushes of hydrangea that filled the school compound were now a shade of dehydrated brown. Unlike Hinamori, Hitsugaya did not return to see their grandmother. She had messed up his hair, pinched his cheeks, and then yelled at him from the other end of the corridor just before she left, and Kusaka had laughed himself into a fit. Then, as suddenly as the halls had emptied, the school filled once again as the break drew to a close. The days grew gradually shorter, the echo of the crickets faded, and the heat of the summer nights slowly relented.

The new term began with the postings of the last term's rankings in the courtyard. Hitsugaya reluctantly let Kusaka take him on a whirlwind tour around all the rankings for all the classes he had taken.

'Look,' Kusaka gestured vaguely at the Third Year board. 'Top of the level here,' he paused to swing an arm in the direction of the Fourth Year board. 'And there.'

'Okay, I get it,' Hitsugaya groaned. 'You're excited. Does it really matter this much?'

Kusaka completely ignored him and dragged him over to the Sixth Year board, which placed him second and Kusaka first. 'You're going to be a legend!' the older boy exclaimed, rapping the board in excitement. 'Everyone's talking about you, even those who can't even read your name.'

'…Great.'

'Exactly my point,' Kusaka said, jabbing a finger animatedly in the air. 'The greatest part of this all, is that you are now a full-fledged sixth-year student.'

'What?'

Kusaka handed him a thin envelope. 'This was in your pigeonhole this morning. I took it while you were busy wasting water in the shower.'

The paper read:

_Hitsugaya Toshiro_

_In view of your outstanding performance in all of your subjects in the spring term, the school board and Education Ministry have taken the liberty of assigning you the following classes for the fall term and henceforth._  
First Subject: History 6A  
Second Subject: Modern Studies 6A  
Demon Arts (Theory and Practical) 6A  
Sword Arts and Physical Combat 6A  
Meditation 6A  
Advanced Tactical Studies 6A

_We hope you will continue to uphold a superior standard in and beyond your education._

Hitsugaya held the paper up to the light, and looked at the seal and signature of the headmaster over again. 'Wow,' he said at length. 'I thought you were kidding.'

'I told you this was great,' Kusaka laughed. 'No more Demon Arts classes with the condescending, miserable Year Fours.'

Hitsugaya smiled back as he tucked the letter into a pocket. 'Thanks,' he said, 'I couldn't have done this without you.'

'Don't be dumb, Toshiro, that's what friends are for.'

_Friends_? It used to be such a foreign word; it had never occurred to him that outside of his hometown, he could be something other than an outcast.

'Kusaka?'

'Yeah?'

'We'll always be friends, right? No matter what?'

Kusaka smiled his easy, confident smile – the exact opposite of Hitsugaya's own hesitant grimace that was, at best, wide enough to show four teeth. They were an odd pair, Hitsugaya knew, two misfits that happened to find common ground in the strangest of ways.

'Always.'


	5. Chapter 5

He didn't have to open his eyes to know that the sky was grey and that the ground was ice. The frigid gale that he had grown far too familiar with threw snow and ice alike in the air, leaving his face stinging and his lips numb. The roars of the dragon filled his ears, a rage of mellifluous chaos, a waterfall of ice crashing over ice, of glass and bone bursting into crystals. The dragon was so close he could feel its breath on his face. It breathed showers of icicles that froze and burned at the same time, icicles that rained down over his head with every exhalation, and it exuded such immense pressure, that though he was aware of every breath the dragon took above him, he could not pinpoint his own. When he finally forced his eyes open a crack and unwrapped his arms from around his own torso, Hitsugaya found himself facing an imposing wall of ice – a wall made of scale after delicate scale, each reflecting and refracting in the dismal light of the snowstorm, each a blue so clear it sent shivers down his spine.

Out of curiosity, or idiocy, or perhaps a combination of both, or maybe they were one and the same, he couldn't quite be sure, he reached out one trembling hand towards the dragon of ice, the dragon that haunted him, the dragon that would kill him. Instantly the wall of ice was gone in a crumbling of ice, and the booming of thunder told him that the dragon had taken flight.

_You are not ready_ , it said, its words cascading downwards and echoing in every direction. _Do not be foolish._

'If I'm not ready,' he shouted into the storm that stole his voice and turned it to howling winds. 'Then why do you keep coming for me? Why do you keep bringing me here?'

The dragon fell silent for an excruciatingly long moment, and the rushing of the blizzard was suddenly distant.

_It is not I who brings you here._

Hitsugaya was about to shout something in response, but found his breath and his words and his thoughts abruptly gone, for in that moment, for the first time, he was face to face with the dragon.

It was a terrifying sight up close – a pointed snout adorned with vicious teeth and horns of ice, a mane of icicles framing its head, and eyes of rubies that stared into his soul. Instinctively, Hitsugaya stumbled backwards, tripping over his own feet and landing on his rear, the frozen ground slashing the bare skin of his palms open as his heart went into overdrive.

_This is not my home_ , the dragon said in a frightening whisper that coalesced into a mist between them. _This is your mind. I ask you, why do you keep bringing me here?_

.

.

He woke in cold sweat again, the shadow of words he had meant for the dragon to hear but couldn't quite remember still on his lips. It had been nearly four months since he had been promoted to year six. Summer was long gone and autumn had passed in a flurry of swirling leaves and gusty winds, leaving the campus blanketed in the bleak grey of short winter days. He could no longer throw the windows open after every encounter with the dragon, and after several trips to the school office, they had finally given him a small electric heater. 'Less studying, Hitsugaya, more meditation,' he'd been told countless times over the term as his dreams got wilder and wilder. It wasn't as if he wasn't trying, and that was what frustrated him the most – the more he meditated, the further he seemed to get from the answers he needed. While he had managed to consistently arrive at the same dimension of his dreams every time he meditated, he had yet to encounter the dragon outside of his dreams – only the vast, white, barren land that was devoid of anything.

It was almost depressing.

So, in an effort to sweep everything under the proverbial carpet and pretend nothing was actually wrong, he immersed himself in his studies and in his training, and it came to a point where he outperformed Kusaka in every single one of their classes.

'You're a beast,' Kusaka told him one day during class when they received their scores for the latest field assignment. 'Fifty-eight hits, Toshiro? That's mad. Those things were fast.'

Hitsugaya made a grab for his results slip but was, not for the first time, betrayed by his own lack of height. 'They let us use shunpo, I thought that's what you were best at, Mr. Long Legs.'

'Catching up to the targets is one thing, actually hitting them is a totally different issue.'

'Yeah, right. What did you get, fifty-seven?'

Kusaka paused. 'Fifty-five.'

'The class average was thirty-three,' Hitsugaya pointed out. 'You are every bit as beastly as I am.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' Kusaka said as he finally let Hitsugaya see his own grades. 'I'm not the one who's going to graduate from the Academy just one year after enrolling.'

'Shut up,' Hitsugaya grumbled, for lack of a sufficient comeback, and moved to grab a training mat from the storage room. But Kusaka was right. From his first day with the Sixth Years, Hitsugaya had steadily overtaken the entire cohort with little effort, and instantly shot up in the rankings where he and Kusaka constantly took the top two spots. They were constantly training, constantly studying, and as a result the gap between them and the rest of the students was constantly widening. Each was the other's rival, and they both knew they would be nowhere near as brilliant as they were without the other.

'It's hand-to-hand combat today,' Kusaka observed lazily as the instructor at the front of the room explained the schedule for the morning. 'Who shall we beat up this time?'

'I was thinking of beating you up,' Hitsugaya joked. 'There's this new trick I'm dying to try out; it feels a little too cruel to use anyone else as a guinea pig.'

'You can't,' Kusaka protested. 'I've got Ancient Literature after this.'

Hitsugaya shrugged. 'Doesn't matter to me, Modern Studies is at four.'

'Is that so?'

Hitsugaya rolled his eyes, and lunged forward anyway, knowing full well that Kusaka would dodge.

'Oh my god, you're the worst.' Kusaka muttered under his breath.

They fought evenly matched, every strike met with a seamless defense, every feint deftly read – to the unconcerned onlooker, it would have seemed more as an elaborate choreography than a spontaneous spar. They were just getting warmed up when Hitsugaya realised that practically the whole class had dropped everything and was watching them intently. Shaking it off, he returned his attention to his opponent – if Kusaka caught him off guard before he could even attempt to execute his "new trick" he was certain he would never hear the end of it for years. So he watched, and he waited, until the perfect opportunity presented itself.

He deflected a blow and took a half-step back, pivoting on his right foot and leaving his left side open to attack, and Kusaka finally took the bait. Kusaka threw his weight forward in a powerful punch, and right before it connected, Hitsugaya broke his defensive stance and grabbed Kusaka's arm with both hands. Then he planted both feet firmly onto the mat, his weight centered low, dug in his heels, and pulled.

There was a collective gasp as he somehow swung Kusaka in a half-arc before letting go, and a collective wince as Kusaka landed on the mat several metres away. 'Hitsugaya!' The instructor barked from across the hall, and he cringed.

'It's not illegal!' He defended himself. 'I've read the books.'

'Just…just don't kill anyone.'

Momentum was a scary thing, Hitsugaya thought, and decided it would be best to apologise later. The instructor, meanwhile, held both hands to his temples and looked as if he had figured a trip to the bar at the end of the day was in order.

Hitsugaya and Kusaka spent the rest of the lesson discussing the physics of using an opponent's momentum against them, and proceeded to test out all the possibilities, much to the delight of their classmates and to the dismay of their instructor. By the end of the morning, they were exhausted and absolutely filthy, and Kusaka was blaming Hitsugaya.

'I'm going to have to shower,' he complained. 'I'll be late for class.'

'Won't be the first time.'

'Well, the last time was because-'

'Not like you pay attention either,' Hitsugaya pointed out.

'Shut up.'

.

.

Although Hitsugaya was now a sixth year and technically shared half his classes with Hinamori, they barely spoke. Hinamori was surrounded by her friendz, as always, and they sat in opposite corners of the classroom, each the polar opposite of the other – Hinamori excelled because she wanted to; Hitsugaya did so only because he had no other choice.

'I think it's great that you're friends with Kusaka,' she said to him in one of their rare conversations after class in the corridor, where Kira and Abarai did not flank her sides and he was without Kusaka. 'You used to be so lonely, but I can tell you're so much happier now,' she smiled at him the way people did to young children.

Hitsugaya bit his tongue, and did not tell Hinamori that it was her stupid friends in Rukongai who had made him so lonely, that it was none of her business now if he was happier without her constant fussing. He pulled her hand off his head and flattened the hair she had messed up and said, 'What do you want?'

It came out more demanding and aloof than he had intended, and he almost regretted the look of hurt that spread across Hinamori's expression and morphed into the familiar grimace that meant she was holding back tears, but he didn't know how to apologise. So instead, he waited for her to speak again.

'Granny misses you, you know,' she blurted, and Hitsugaya let go of her wrist. 'She didn't say, but obviously she'd hoped you would visit over the summer.'

Hitsugaya avoided Hinamori's piercing gaze, and slumped against the cool wood of the wall, but still did not say a word. He knew what Hinamori was getting at, and knew that in his current state there was no way he could return to see their grandmother, not when the dragon was still constantly turning his sleep into winter storms that he could not control. He could not tell her the reason he had left, either, so he remained silent.

Hinamori chewed her lip, obviously choosing her words carefully so she could convince him of something. 'I know doing well at school is important to you, and I know being with your friends is fun, but they can't be more important than Granny, right?'

He nearly laughed at the irony of it all – he was here, and not in Rukongai, solely because nothing was more important than their grandmother. None of this would have been necessary if he had that dragon problem under control, or better still, if he did not have a dragon problem at all. Hitsugaya sighed audibly, and Hinamori relented.

'Promise me you'll try to go back during the winter break?' she asked pleadingly.

She was asking the impossible of him, Hitsugaya thought. How could he tame the dragon and master Shikai in the few short weeks before the term ended? It was his own fault, really, for not explaining anything to her.

'Okay,' he said softly. 'I'll try, but no promises.'

That was the day he finally took his teachers' advice and stopped studying, and began meditating like a man possessed. Kusaka took this sudden and inexplicable change in attitude in his stride, collecting homework and taking extra notes on the days Hitsugaya skipped class in favour of meditation. Hitsugaya was starting to feel that a year's worth of tiny steamed cakes was not enough to repay Kusaka for his kindness.

'You're not supposed to feel guilty for letting your friends care for you,' Kusaka told him through a mouthful of cake when he voiced this particular concern. 'Though I do appreciate the dessert, it would be immoral for me to proclaim friendship but ask something in return for everything.'

Stifling a yawn, Hitsugaya nodded and pretended he had not just accidently dropped his chopsticks out of sleepiness.

'…I saw that,' Kusaka said.

'No you didn't,' Hitsugaya replied after a moment's thought.

'My silence comes at a price.' Kusaka decided that if Hitsugaya was too sleepy to point out the blatant contradiction between this statement and the friendship policy he had just told him not twenty seconds ago, he was too sleepy to function.

'Name it.'

'Go for class. Sleep during class. Sleep after class. Sleep at night. You know, normal human behaviour. Sleep, in particular.'

A tiny part of him knew Kusaka was right. He was spending at least three hours each day after school hours deep in his inner world, away from reality, achieving absolutely nothing other than depleting his own energy and soundness of mind. It made no sense – if effort didn't achieve results, what did?

Nothing changed, despite his efforts to speak to the dragon. It never answered his questions, and only ever spoke in cryptic riddles he could not understand. To compensate for the energy he spent stretching his soul out to reach the dragon of ice, he slept like a rock for hours on end at night – though he still woke blanketed in snow and frosty winds. There was little time to squeeze in extra training or studying, but much to the frustration of the rest of the class, the complete lack of effort Hitsugaya had begun to show in his academics did not reflect on his performance during exams at all. Even Kusaka was stunned when Hitsugaya outdid him once again in the latest field exercise.

He was tired, too tired to care that Hinamori was going to be mad at him for something that wasn't anyone's fault, but not tired enough to let his grades slide and undo everything he had worked for since the start of the year.

On the last day of the fall term, he was nearly taken by surprise when Hinamori cornered him in the corridor after their last paper.

'Shiro-chan! It's winter break!' Hinamori practically knocked him over when she grabbed a railing by the stairs so that she spun to an abrupt stop. 'You're going home, right?'

'Ah, uh…'

'Yes?' She was staring at him intently, and after only a few seconds of holding her expectant gaze, he gave up and looked away.

'Sorry, I can't,' he mumbled, and the excitement that was bubbling over the surface subsided, and a series of emotions played across Hinamori's face in rapid succession. A mix of disbelief and surprise was quickly taken over by confusion, then disappointment and anger.

'What do you mean, "you can't"?' she asked furiously. 'You promised!'

'No, I did _not_ promise. I said I'd try and I did, and I couldn't do it, so I can't!' he said, twice as furious that she had dared assume he was as carefree as she thought he should be.

Hinamori took a moment to digest this, and then pouted. 'Couldn't do what?'

'I don't have to tell you everything,' Hitsugaya retorted stubbornly. Their argument was escalating, he knew, but he did not care.

'You're always like this,' Hinamori said shrilly, her voice rising and beginning to quiver. 'You get upset and don't tell me anything, and then you say terrible things because you think no one could be as miserable as you are! Maybe for once, you should-'

'No, _you_ are always like this. You think that just because life is easy for you, life is easy for everyone, and then you say terrible things because you think no one could possibly be troubled to the point of breaking!' By now, everyone was staring, and by tomorrow the rumours would be flying.

'I never-' Hinamori swallowed her words, took a deep breath, and started over. 'You always said you hated other people. I-If you hated me too, you should have just said so, then I wouldn't have to keep wasting my breath being kind to you! We could just _both_ hate each other, and it would all be easy for all of us.'

Hitsugaya folded his arms across his chest, as if it could protect him from what he was going to say next. It was better that she hate him forever for being a brat than if she hated him forever for killing their grandmother in her sleep. 'Fine. I'm not going back,' he said.

'Okay, then don't ever come back,' Hinamori said with a flourish of finality, and turned around in a huff and fled down the stairs. He knew she was crying, but the only thing he was ever good at was pouring salt into her wounds.

When she was two floors down, he yelled over the banister, 'I won't! Ever!'

Hinamori stopped on the landing and turned to look back up at him. 'I hate you!'

Hitsugaya watched as she ran across the compound and out of the school gates, and kept watching until she disappeared into the distance along the sandy, worn path that led back home. Then he collapsed against the wall and slid down until he was crouched on the floor, the cold wood of the wall against the side of his face, and stayed there until it was long after dark.

.

.

It was during the first week of the winter term when it happened.

When he opened his eyes, the air was surprisingly still. Instead of ice, he walked on powder snow, and though the sky was still a permanent chalky shade of opaque grey, the weather was fair. To his left, a mountain range he knew so well he could recall its shape without trying spread with distant grandeur, and to his right, the horizon extended seemingly eternally into the distance, where it faded into a barely perceptible line between the white of the ground and the pale grey of the low atmosphere. Hitsugaya turned, so the mountains were to his right and the plains to his left, and saw an immense wall of solid ice that glimmered faintly, glowing the same pure blue of the scales of the dragon.

He took one hesitant step towards the wall, then another, and then another, until he stood so close to the wall he could see the uncertainty in his own reflection. The ice was simultaneously clear as water and dark as stone, and his breath fogged its surface like a window in winter.

He raised a hand, his cold fingertips brushing his distorted reflection, and in that instant the murky, clouded depths of the wall of ice turned bright as polished diamond and he swore he heard the chiming of a large bell far in the distance. It had to be the cold messing with his senses.

The moment he touched the wall, peace exploded into chaos. The gale he knew so well whipped the snow into a spiralling whirl around him, and with the crashing of everything fragile colliding into stone and shattering into innumerable fragments, the dragon descended from the sky, screeching with an ear-piercing roar. Hitsugaya was thrown unceremoniously from the wall and he landed sprawled on his side in the snow, unable to break his own fall and completely winded – but not before he caught a split-second glimpse of what was beyond the wall.

There had been a silhouette.

Not the dragon's – no, it was much smaller, it was a person's shadow.

'Wait!' he shouted at the dragon, scrambling up and running towards the wall, not caring that the storm was probably hurting him. 'Who's there?'

_Don't-_

The dragon's silent cry rended his heart, and he stumbled and fell, and picked himself up, and continued running. The storm intensified, until he couldn't tell which way was which or where the wall of ice was or where the dragon had gone, but still he ran. He ran until the scenery spun before his eyes, until his breath clouded his own vision, until he fell and couldn't find the energy to stand.

He was gripped with a fear he had never known before – there was something, some _one_ in his mind. He could only assume the wall was the dragon's doing, in an effort to keep the person away from him, and it scared him.

It scared him so much that he tore himself forcibly from his meditation, and bolted from the training room without a word to any of the instructors. When the blind panic subsided enough for him to grasp the gravity of the situation, he threw up under a bush, but even the nauseating churning in his stomach and the bitter bile in his mouth was better than the stranger in his mind. He didn't know how many people he ran over in the corridors, didn't even know where he wanted to go – anywhere, anywhere but the plain of ice with the dragon of ice and its wall of ice and the foreign silhouette of the unknown, anywhere but _inside his own mind_.

How do you run from yourself?

His feet carried him to the library, where he sat, dazed, for what could have been seconds or hours – he didn't know. Then, as if driven by madness, he began systematically pulling all the books on Zanpakuto that the library had to offer, stacking them on the largest table he could find, and he was mechanically turning page after page after page, scouring for information he knew he would never find on _what the hell was wrong with him_ until his eyes burned and his fingers shook as he scrabbled to turn the corner of the next page.

It was in this catatonic state that Kusaka found him.

'Oh, hey, there you are!' Kusaka said as loudly as his library manners allowed him to. 'What's wrong? They said you ran out of class, there was sick under the bush outside-'

For the first time in what felt like hours, Hitsugaya set the book he was holding down and looked up. Kusaka was met with a pair of bloodshot eyes that were out of focus, and he stopped short.

Toshiro?' He pried the dusty tome out of the boy's desperate grasp. 'What happened?'

After a few moments of resistance, Hitsugaya let Kusaka have the book, and pulled his knees up so he could rest his pounding head upon them. Between strangled breaths, he struggled with his words. Everything felt so wrong, from the inside out, he felt twisted out of shape and though he didn't have a clue as to what was going on and didn't have the words do describe the discord that was so fundamentally distressing, a small part of him knew he couldn't tell anyone, not even Kusaka, what exactly was wrong, that if he did the results would be disastrous.

'I can't- You can't- You can't tell anyone,' he whispered into his knees. He couldn't bring himself to feel bad about lying to the one person who had yet to lie to him.

'Okay,' Kusaka said without missing a beat, and in that instant a twinge of guilt twisted his stomach, and he nearly told the truth, but at the last moment he stopped himself, and settled for a half-truth.

'Oh god,' he said almost inaudibly when he finally found the energy to lift his head and give Kusaka a haunted, gauntly stare. 'My Zanpakuto is making me sick.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starting with ch6, I'll be posting simultaneously on AO3 and FF (I hope). Please hang around, even though I take really long to update. Thank you for reading!


	6. Chapter 6

He did not sleep that night, nor the next. He did not see the plain of ice, or the dragon, or the stranger. All things considered, everything was good. He had only accidentally fallen asleep once so far.

'You know,' Kusaka said to him on the third day. 'You don't look so good.'

Hitsugaya mumbled something unintelligible under his breath, and resolutely turned another page on the book he had borrowed from the library. Neither of them was paying attention to the lesson, for Kusaka had been amiably keeping Hitsugaya company as he meticulously tore the library apart, so while Hitsugaya pored over what must have been the thousandth useless book so far, Kusaka was reading novel after novel.

'In fact,' Kusaka added, 'I would go so far as to say you look horrible.'

'Surely you exaggerate,' Hitsugaya drawled. 'It's only been three days.'

'Look over there,' Kusaka nudged him. 'It's Arita. I last saw him unconscious in bed not five hours ago and now he's asleep in class too.'

Hitsugaya had no words for that, so he turned another page.

'Besides,' Kusaka tried again. 'Don't you think you'd be reading a lot faster if you squeezed in a few hours of sleep every so often?'

'I can't,' Hitsugaya protested. 'I'm not going there again.'

'Do you mean…your inner world?'

He nodded.

'That's kind of problematic, since you're training to be a shinigami, right?'

'Yes, but at the moment I'm running from all my problems.'

Kusaka had never met someone so smart but yet made so little sense.

'Do you even hear yourself saying these things?'

'Yes,' Hitsugaya admitted. 'But perhaps it is the lack of sleep talking, because I don't quite get it myself either.'

'Oookay?' Kusaka decided not to point out to his friend that he had just argued himself into a corner, and that perhaps forceful action was in order. 'If you would just give me that,' he said, reaching over to pluck Hitsugaya's precious book out of his death grip. If he had nothing to read, Kusaka reasoned, he would eventually sleep, right?

Wrong. Hitsugaya shot him a look of wrath and produced another book from his bag, and Kusaka nearly wrung his hands on the spot. Taking a deep breath, Kusaka confiscated the second book as well.

'Why do you do this to me?' Hitsugaya demanded.

'Because it would look a lot dumber on your epitaph if you died of lack of sleep than if you died facing your zanpakuto. And I assure you, if you _do_ die of lack of sleep _I_ will be writing your epitaph. It will be ridiculous and embarrassing, and in rhyme.'

He must have forgotten to whisper, because the teacher was giving him a rather stern glare. 'Kusaka, if you would be so kind as to share with the class what exactly will be ridiculous and embarrassing and in rhyme?'

He glanced up guiltily at the teacher, looked back at Hitsugaya, and then looked around the class before saying loudly, 'Toshiro's epitaph, sir.'

The class erupted in laughter, and the teacher was shaking his head, but Kusaka thought it was a disaster well averted. He had come to realise that arguing with a sleep-deprived Hitsugaya was not going to get him anywhere, so he reluctantly returned the books he had snatched. When the lesson was over, he would drag the idiot, kicking and screaming if he had to, to the nurse's office.

.

.

Kicking and screaming did not justify the protest Hitsugaya had put up. There had been no screaming, but there was a lot of swearing, plenty of kicking, and a lot of befuddling logic that nearly convinced Kusaka to admit that perhaps he was overreacting. Hitsugaya made incredibly compelling arguments for someone who was half brain-dead, he marvelled. Finally, when they were just outside the door to the office, Hitsugaya dug his heels into the floor and refused to budge.

'You know I can't go in. I can't exactly tell them what's going on!' He hissed under his breath.

'Well then, we'll just make something up. You've been suddenly struck by insomnia for no apparent reason. There. Now we can go in.'

'They'll think I'm lying! Or crazy, or both!'

Kusaka folded his arms and levelled his friend with a look that would send most people running. 'I'm composing your epitaph as we speak. "There once was a boy called Toshiro, who wouldn't listen to his friend Sojiro-"'

'Very funny,' Hitsugaya said, taking an adamant step away from the office, but coming to an abrupt halt when an absolutely evil look began to spread across Kusaka's face. 'Whatever you're thinking, stop thinking it,' he said wearily.

'No, no,' Kusaka said imploringly. 'It's a fabulous idea, right up crazy alley, which I believe is your street.'

Hitsugaya furrowed his eyebrows, quite sure his friend was being sarcastic, or scathing, or something similar. 'Okay, let's hear it,' he said anyway, keen for any sort of distraction from his own craziness.

'They always say the best solution is to nip it in the bud, but since it looks like you've already progressed into some kind of deeply rooted weed-'

'What?'

'No, okay, let me try that again. You have a zanpakuto running out of control? Go fight it. Win command over the power that should be working for you, not against you.'

Hitsugaya considered this suggestion seriously. On one hand, Kusaka was right – if his zanpakuto was so aggressively approaching him, did it mean he was more ready than he thought himself to be? On the other hand, Kusaka was _still_ right – his idea was the essence of crazy, not to mention suicidal, and reckless, and dangerous.

If – _if_ – he battled the dragon and won, would the wall of ice fall? Would the stranger, and all his problems, disappear? The number of people who would miss him if he battled the dragon and lost he could count on one hand. He couldn't even begin to wrap his mind around how ridiculously outrageous this idea was, and couldn't quite explain to himself why he was already resigned to losing _everything_ despite whatever the outcome might be, so why did it matter if he went along or not?

He was about to tell Kusaka to give him a day to think it over when a gust of wind tore through him, and the familiar voice of the dragon boomed in his mind, threatening to throw him off the edge of sanity.

_Toshiro, we have no time._

_I don't understand_ , he thought, flinging his words out in whichever direction would take them. It was disorienting to be in two dimensions at once, to hear his own voice echo around him even though he had not moved his lips, with the snow swirling around him and Kusaka standing oblivious in the corridor next to him.

_Hurry._

And the wind stopped as suddenly as it had come, the tundra lifted and the corridor stopped spinning around him. His breath returned, though he had not noticed when he had lost it, and with the urgent rumbling of the dragon in the back of his mind, against all his instincts, Hitsugaya agreed to Kusaka's crazy idea.

It all happened frighteningly smoothly. It was the weekend, so they simply booked out at the front office, and left with strict warnings to be back in time for their next classes. Then they headed north, to where the plains rose into hills and then mountains, under which a whole labyrinth of caves was said to sprawl and twine in dark stone. It was in the cool, almost cold depths of a dark tunnel that widened into a clearing littered with rocks where they finally stopped. The whole time, Kusaka had chattered endlessly about how he too had been training and felt ready to confront his zanpakuto – which was a scary-ass snarling beast – and wouldn't it be cool, if they _both_ achieved shikai at the same time, and wouldn't it be _amazing_ , if they both returned as the first of the cohort to successfully win command over their zanpakuto. Hitsugaya nodded along, not really paying attention to what exactly Kusaka had been saying, reluctant to dampen his effervescent excitement with his doubts. Who was he, anyway, to throw a wet blanket over everything when he was the one who agreed to go along with this ridiculousness? He knew he was the reason Kusaka was resorting to such madness, and felt almost sorry for accepting his offer of friendship all those months ago.

'I think I'll sit here,' Kusaka said as he patted a large boulder with a plateaued top.

'Right. I'll find somewhere,' Hitsugaya said vaguely, and hopped nimbly over a small heap of broken stone and pebbles. He ducked between a tall and narrow cleft in the far wall, wandering in until a shelf in the rock widened enough for him to sit comfortably on. He could hear water trickling in the distance and echoing softly around him, and damp patches glimmered like diamonds in the faint light. He stood precariously on the rock, and with a well-practised swing he dug the tip of his sword into the rough surface so that it stood, quivering like a freshly shot arrow, ringing softly like a large bell in a distant city. Then he sat cross-legged before it, and closed his eyes, willing the snow to overwhelm him, waiting for the dragon to sweep him away to its dimension. For some reason he was not afraid of whatever would happen next – it was this complete _lack_ of fear that was winding his nerves up with worry.

He should have been afraid – he was diving headfirst and half blind into a battle with nothing but his wits and meagre skill, but a small part of him reasoned that the dragon must have been on his side, or he would have died a long time ago in his bed in Junrinan.

So he was frighteningly calm; he didn't flinch when darkness claimed him and turned his world upside-down before upending him on a blanket of snow, not even when the dragon materialised before him like an otherworldly apparition, eyes bright and fangs bared, its scales refracting every particle of light that fell on it as it moved with the grace of a swan and the chaotic cacophony of ice cracking and crumbling like glass shattering and bone grating amidst the screech of the surrounding air as it cooled to frigid temperatures and coalesced in a veiling mist. It was a terrific sound that would send even the bravest of warriors scurrying with their hands over their ears, but Hitsugaya stood his ground with his newfound brazenness, only his stubbornness keeping his chin from quivering as he held it high in the face of destruction.

When the dust finally settled, the dragon surveyed him with a curiosity Hitsugaya had never seen before. Adrenaline was beginning to fill his veins as he stood unarmed before the majestic creature, his muscles curling in anticipation for a fight he couldn't afford to lose.

 _If you are ready,_ the dragon said loftily as a gale began to pick up, _I challenge you to a duel._

He threw a wary look towards the wall that the dragon stood protectively in front of, that the stranger in his mind resided behind, standing tall and unmoveable as ever, but quickly brought his gaze back to his opponent. A little of his courage wilted inside him, and to make up for it he jutted his chin just a little higher, stood just a little taller. His hands felt empty without the hilt of a sword between his palms, but he brushed the sensation aside.

He'd been training for this moment.

'I accept.'

_Prove your worth to me, child._

Without so much as a warning, the dragon was gone, spiralling up into the air, its wings beating a rhythm against the sky, flying higher and higher until he lost sight of its silhouette. Hitsugaya's breath caught in his throat, but the gears in his brain spun as he willed himself to analyse the situation calmly. The dragon must have been hundreds of times his size, and he had the certain disadvantage of being very firmly grounded, so obviously any form of physical combat was out of the question. His best bet was to be alert, and to find a way to use his full repertoire of Kido skills in a way that would actually work.

A faint whistling sound made him look up just in time to see a group of icicles hurtling through the air towards him. He swore and dodged with a shunpo, landing on all fours a short distance away. He scrambled to get up, but was forced down again by a second barrage. This time he rolled to the side, and dug his elbow into the snow to push himself up the moment he had the chance. He couldn't tell if the dragon had some kind of bionic vision and could see where he was, or if it was merely firing indiscriminately, and he couldn't afford to give his position away by firing a counterattack of his own, not when he couldn't see where the attacks were coming from.

A shadow crossed his line of sight in the oddly clear but still depressingly grey sky, and Hitsugaya took aim for his first shot of the battle. A flash of bright lightning flew from his hands and disappeared into the sky as the dragon dodged with ease.

He didn't stop to see if he had hit his mark, because he hadn't expected to land a hit on something so powerful on his first try. Instead he immediately began the incantation for a shield spell for when the next surge of deadly icicles came raining down upon him. He had to hold out long enough to lure the dragon closer to the ground, where he had better aim and a better chance of gaining the upper hand. He needed to see more of what it was capable of so he could defend himself and form some kind of strategy. He couldn't keep running forever, couldn't keep waiting for the dragon to show itself while he tired himself out.

_Is running all you can do?_

The dragon's taunt hung low in the air like a thick and persistent fog, clinging to his every fibre and refusing to let go.

Hitsugaya bit his lip and continued running. Not yet, he told himself.

The dragon descended, circling downwards with its deadly claws extended like a hawk bearing down on its prey, but still Hitsugaya ran, half stumbling over his own feet as he willed himself to stay calm, to hold out until the very last moment possible. He'd read about how shinigami could stand in the sky by floating on invisible manifestations of their reiatsu, and decided that now was as good a time as any to test the technique out. He just needed the right opportunity-

The dragon was upon him, its immense wingspan eclipsing the light in the sky, a deadly gleam in its bright red eyes shining in the ominous shadow it cast over him. Its claws narrowly missed him as he ducked and threw himself into the air, blasting his reiatsu behind him in an effort to propel himself higher, higher still, but still he could never be face to face with the beast of ice.

Hitsugaya twisted around in the air and brought his hands up, a blinding white ball blazing between them. 'Hado no.33, Sokatsui!' his shout was swallowed in the deafening tempest that followed the dragon everywhere it went, but his attack stayed true, and flew into the dragon's shoulder with a mighty cloud of smoke.

The smoke shrouded his vision, and before he could even finish cussing, the dragon had spun around and its enormous tail swung as it roared, colliding into his side and tossing him out of the air. He landed painfully on the ground before he could even register that he had been falling from such a dangerous height, completely winded and mildly surprised to be still alive. He had broken his fall with his left arm, which definitely had not been a good idea.

_Ohgod-_

No time to swear, he admonished himself, and peeled his suddenly tired body off the ground as the dragon screeched a deafening battle cry. He was running again, ignoring the dull throbbing in his side and in his left arm, mentally checking off the tactics that wouldn't work against the dragon. He'd thought fire would have been his weapon of choice against this elemental beast, but he couldn't use it without blinding himself with billowing smoke in the battlefield. Sheer brute force would get him nowhere either, not when the dragon was so much faster and so much stronger. He needed a strategy, and he needed it fast.

He needed to stay two steps ahead, and for that he needed to see how the dragon moved, where it left itself open during and immediately after attack. He had noticed that where the dragon made contact with the ground, crystals of ice sprouted and remained. The more the dragon attacked, the more he had to work with on the ground – a messy terrain meant better cover and easier means to buy himself time, and greater access to impromptu weapons. Anything was better than a wasted plain of nothingness, he decided, so he moved.

Time to use some of the flashy stuff, he thought.

Hitsugaya flung bright red sparks in three different directions, exploding one of the clusters of ice with unnecessary flamboyance.

 _Tell me_ , the dragon said as it circled high in the air, _Why do you fight?_

Hitsugaya faltered. Why? The "why" had never been something he'd been allowed to question; he'd been whisked mercilessly from his home by no choice of his own.

'I-I don't know,' he whispered after an excruciatingly long silence, painfully honest, and the dragon growled in contempt.

He grit his teeth when the telltale whistle of missiles of ice flying towards him met his ears, and dodged at the last second. He whirled around to see the dragon spiralling up and away from the attack – it spiralled counter-clockwise, he noted, which meant it always veered to the left after landing a hit. He threw more sparks, none of which landed anywhere near his opponent, which only served to fuel the dragon's ire.

 _Perhaps I overestimated you_ , it said furiously as more ice rained down upon him.

'I haven't done anything yet,' Hitsugaya retorted, propelling himself off a pile of broken ice to avoid getting lashed at again by its deadly tail. 'Is throwing ice all _you_ can do? Maybe _I_ overestimated _you_.'

No no no – why did he say that? Don't piss the dragon off; don't insult zanpakuto spirits in general.

The dragon screeched again, and thick black clouds began to roll in from the horizon. It dived down for another strike, and this time, Hitsugaya did not run.

He planted his feet firmly in the coarse snow and held his hands up again for another spell. 'Bakudo no.8, Seki!'

A small ball of light burned furiously at his palms, and the dragon collided into it with full force, exploding around him in a shower of ice and snow and frigid air with the most bone-chilling shatter, before coming together out of thin air and broken shards within a fraction of a second then spiralling off again. The momentum threw him off his feet, and he was curled up on his side in the snow again, coughing the dust out of his lungs while his chance at firing a close-range counterattack at the dragon slipped through his fingers.

He squinted at its retreating form, the words for the next spell falling from his lips before he could think his actions through. 'Hado no.58, Tenran!'

It was a spell he had never tried before, not only because it was out of the practical lesson's syllabus, but also because it was quite firmly banned on campus for its uncontrollable scale.

The effect was immediate. The air around him whirled towards him like light towards a black hole, concentrating at his hands and spinning at terrifying speeds, growing larger and larger with every passing moment until it extended out like a blast from a cannon. He poured his power into the storm, refusing to let go, refusing to let his attack lose speed until he felt it connect with the dragon.

When he finally did let the storm dissipate, the power it required instantly left him like snow falling out of barren trees – leaving him shaken and cold and momentarily at a loss, and it was this short-lived stupor that threw him off balance when the dragon delivered its next blow.

An icy blast of air barrelled into him from above and, unable to do much else, he crouched low on the ground, spreading his reiatsu around in a makeshift shield. When the pressure let up and he finally dared open his eyes, he was surrounded by a thick layer of blue ice that trapped him close to the ground, where only his makeshift shield had protected him from being crushed like an insect underfoot.

In the limited space, his panting breaths echoed around him and coalesced in the cold air as white smoke around his face. His hands were cold, and his already injured left arm was trembling. He suspected it could only withstand at most two more high-levelled spells before the blowback completely wore the strained muscles out. Then he took stock of his reiatsu levels, in an attempt to gauge how much longer he could prolong this dodging game to buy himself time to analyse the dragon's style – he allowed himself only one chance at a full-out offence, and couldn't afford to let slide any tiny details that might render his plan redundant. So even though he was trapped, he was also temporarily safe – and he would take the time to strategise and recover.

Waiting during battle always made him uneasy. It always felt like an immense waste of time, even though he knew that rushing never paid off. He waited as he caught his breath, and kept waiting until he nearly imploded, and just as he thought he would die of impatience, the moment he had been watching for arrived.

The ice above him cracked, a thin but deep fissure that crept across its surface. With explosive force he shattered the layer with his own reiatsu and sprang forward, landing on the balls of his feet and glancing desperately around to locate his target.

The dragon beat him to it as it spotted him amidst the wreckage first, and it swooped down low, banking so deeply that the tip of one wing dug into the ground, and sprayed him with snow.

 _Took you long enough_ , it rumbled as it flew past and swerved upwards once more. _Show me what you've got, child._

Hitsugaya spluttered – the snow was wet and so was he now, thanks to the dragon, which meant he was weighted down and slower than before. He wiped his damp brow with one soggy sleeve, cussing again when snow fell out of his hair and onto his face. The dragon began descending again, and he decisively sprinted towards it instead of away.

 _Tell me again,_ it repeated as it twisted through the air, _Why do you fight?_

Hitsugaya continued running, not caring that he was quickly turning breathless. He considered the dragon's question and his current predicament once more – he was here, fighting, but why?

'Because,' he forced out, recalling how his grandmother would wake shivering in the morning, and how he himself had endured countless sleepless nights at the Academy, and how he and Hinamori were no longer on speaking terms because of his helplessness, and how Kusaka had been dragged down into his madness because of his own foolishness.

'Because I have to!' he shouted at the dragon. 'Because if I don't, I'll lose everything!' _If I haven't already lost it all_ , he added to himself.

The dragon hummed in response, but Hitsugaya did not give it time to reply, for now it was flying low enough for him to launch the attack he'd been planning since the start of the battle. So much of his plan was an unpredictable gamble, but he didn't have the time to doubt any of it. He raised his hands for yet another spell that was banned on campus.

'Bakudo no.62, Hyapporankan!' A rod of bright lilac light formed in his hands, a deadly weapon that stung his palms slightly as he held it tight in his grip while he took aim. When he threw the lance, it multiplied around him as it left his touch, a formidable array of weapons that flew in unison towards the dragon. The rods of light burst away in succession, as if they were arrows released by a squadron of archers, each one flying narrowly over the dragon's head, forcing it to dip lower and lower, until its belly was nearly scraping the ground, yet Hitsugaya still refused to let it up, and poured on speed as he sprinted towards his opponent with reckless abandon.

He caught up to its tail just as the last trace of lilac light faded into the atmosphere, and the dragon spread its wings, and tilted its head upward and leftward to spiral back into the air. If the dragon spiralled leftwards, Hitsugaya told himself, then the tail would retreat to the right.

He leaned to his right just seconds before the tail did, and with much effort, he launched himself forward, boosting his takeoff with a burst of reiatsu.

Hitsugaya scraped both palms and knees in his endeavour, and let out a gasp of surprise when he successfully landed on the dragon's heavy tail, which he knew was the most dangerous part to stand on, for it could flick him off with absolutely no effort at all. So he hurriedly scrambled forwards on the coarse scales, darting on all fours for the stability he needed. The dragon must have noticed, for it was twisting and curling erratically in the air, trying to knock him off.

Tough, he thought. Like _hell_ he was going to let go so easily.

He clung tightly whenever the dragon turned upside down, and kept clambering towards the front end of the dragon whenever he could, and not once did he loosen his grip as he stumbled – sometimes up, sometimes down – across the dragon's supple, sinewy back. By the time he reached its shoulders, his hands and forearms were torn to ribbons from its protective scales of ice, but he didn't care.

The dragon was soaring frighteningly high in the air, possibly to intimidate him, so he refused to be afraid. There was a lull as the dragon slowed down to twist violently around, and Hitsugaya seized the opportunity.

He planted one sandalled foot atop the dragon's cranium, leapt forward to land nimbly on its snout before pushing off one last time in a quick somersault. His heart was slamming in his chest, but he could not afford to hesitate. Not here, not now.

Now he was in the air, above the dragon and looking down on its dangerous snout. Hitsugaya held his bloodied hands out, poised for his last attack, but did not fire.

They were both falling through the sky now, so high up that the ground seemed to be an insignificant concern. He looked into the dragon's large, deep-set eyes, locking gazes with the creature he had always thought was his enemy. He spoke, his voice steadier than he expected it to be, and not once did he let the dragon see that he was shaking.

'My name is Hitsugaya Toshiro,' he said under his breath, just loud enough to cross the short distance between them. 'Are you worthy to be my strength?'

The dragon snorted, not unlike how a human would chuckle, and closed its eyes in understanding acquiescence. The stormy clouds collected above them, and both the dragon and the clouds streamed towards him with astounding clarity. As they approached, the clouds thinned and the dragon began to dissipate, and he felt pure, raw power accumulate around his being.

In his outstretched hand, a sword began to form – first an elegant hilt with a star-shaped guard, then a sharp, polished blade extending towards the sky, and finally a thin chain at the pommel that ended in a crescent-shaped scythe curled at his feet. The dragon and its storm were gone from the plain of ice, and the sky was a shade of blue as clear as water.

He felt, rather than heard, the sword that he held high above his head speak in a gentle hum that reverberated in his heart with a triumphant ring.

_Call on me_

'Reign over the frosted heavens-' The words fell from his lips with a rush of distant familiarity, as if he knew them before, and somehow they felt right on his tongue.

_My name is-_

'Hyorinmaru!'


End file.
